Osintgram: Instagram Scraping Tool for Linux and Windows

Instagram is a rapidly growing social media platform with billions of users, serving as more than just a social network. People around the world are leveraging Instagram for business and to reach a broader audience. The platform is known for its robust security measures, making it extremely difficult to hack or crack an account—unless users make careless mistakes.

What is Scraping?

Imagine you have a large database of records containing students' names, roll numbers, phone numbers, emails, etc., and you only need the list of student names and phone numbers. Instead of manually copying and pasting the information, you can write a script to automate the process. With the script, you only need to input the database file, and the script will automatically generate a new list of the names and phone numbers. This method is much faster and more efficient than doing it manually.

The process of extracting specific data from an existing database is known as scraping. In this article, we’ll explore how you can perform Instagram scraping using an automated Python script called Osintgram.

Requirements

• Python 3
• A fake Instagram account (with two-factor authentication disabled)

If you don't have a fake account, you can easily create one using temporary mail services by searching online.

The process may vary slightly for Windows users, and you might need to set up GIT and Python3 in the Windows command prompt. You can search online for guidance. This article focuses on explaining the method for Kali Linux.

To begin, open your terminal and use the following command to clone the automated script:

git clone https://github.com/Datalux/Osintgram

cd Osintgram

python3 -m venv venv

source venv/bin/activate

pip install -r reuquirements.txt

Once you've successfully completed all the steps without encountering any errors, enter the following command to link your fake Instagram account to the script.

make setup

Next, enter your credentials and press Enter. After that, run the following command to begin using the script. 

python3 main.py <target username>

If your terminal displays an error while running this command, try running it 3-4 times. Eventually, you should see the script’s banner and help commands.

Note: To scrape information about a target user and their followers, you must have the target user in your fake account's following list, and their account must be public.