Twister

Permutation engine for generating and checking the availability of malicious
Twitter usernames. Several edit operations are supported: substitution,
transposition, insertion, deletion, and prefix/suffix. Inspired by
dnstwist.

Twister Screenshot

Prerequisites

Python 3

Install

git clone https://github.com/mh0x/twister.git

Usage

usage: twister.py [-h] [-c] [-q] [-o OUTPUT] [-n THREADS]
                  [-r RETRIES] [-t TIMEOUT] profile user [user ...]
positional arguments:
  profile                        generator profile json
  user                           target username(s)
optional arguments:
  -h, --help                     show this help message and exit
  -c, --check                    check availability of generated usernames
  -q, --quiet                    suppress messages sent to stdout
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT     output results to csv file
  -n THREADS, --threads THREADS  max concurrent requests (default: 5)
  -r RETRIES, --retries RETRIES  max request retries (default: 2)
  -t TIMEOUT, --timeout TIMEOUT  request timeout, secs (default: 10)
edit operations:                              notation:
  {"sub": {x: [y, ...], ...}, "max": n}         x, y  characters
  {"tra": [[x, y], ...], "max": n}              u     strings
  {"ins": {x: [y, ...], ...}, "max": n}         n     positive integers
  {"del": [x, ...], "max": n}
  {"pre": [u, ...]}
  {"suf": [u, ...]}

Profiles

A generator profile is a JSON description of a pipeline of edit operations:

[ o₁ , o₂ , o₃ , …
o_n ]

The output of o₁ passed to o₂, whose output is passed
to o₃, and so on to o_n.

Operations

Supported edit operations are described below using the following notation:

‘x’ and ‘y’ range over characters;
‘u’ and ‘v’ range over strings;
‘n’ ranges over positive integers;
asterisks denote Kleene star (ignoring comma separators).

Note: Operations that perform single-character edits have a max property
that specifies their maximum edit distance.

Substitution (uxv → uyv)

{"sub":{ (" x ":[ (" y ")* ])* },"max": n }

Transposition (uxyv → uyxv)

{"tra":[ ([" x "," y "])* ],"max": n }

Insertion (uxv → uxyv)

{"ins":{ (" x ":[ (" y ")* ])* },"max": n }

Deletion (uxv → uv)

{"del":[ (" x ")* ],"max": n }

Prefix (u → vu)

{"pre":[ (" v ")* ]}

Suffix (u → uv)

{"suf":[ (" v ")* ]}

Examples

Some examples of individual edit operations are provided in
ops/:

Common Deletions (taken from
[1])
Common Transpositions (taken from
[1])
Company Suffixes (taken from
[2])
Double Hits
Fat Fingers
Homoglyphs (taken from
[3])
Language Code Suffixes (taken from
[4])
Mishits

Note: max values are provisionally set to 1.

Complex Profiles

The profile argument accepts a JSON string or a path to a JSON file. The
latter option is useful for specifying complex profiles. Alternatively,
individual edit operations may be saved (cf.
ops/)
and composed on the command line:

twister.py [args ...] <<< echo "[$(cat op1.json), $(cat op2.json), ...]" user [user ...]

Usernames

Twitter usernames are case-insensitive strings of 1–15 characters (a–z,
A–Z, 0–9, _)
[5]. Hence, user and profile
arguments are converted to lower-case.

Output

The -o/--output option outputs the results to a given file, in CSV format.
The first column contains generated usernames. If the -c/--check option is
specified, there is a second column that contains their availability status
(1 available, 0 unavailable, -1 error).

References

Sloppy Typing

https://datagenetics.com/blog/november42012/index.html
Copmany Suffixes

https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/company-suffixes
List of Visually Similar Characters for Detecting Spoofing and Social
Engineering Attacks

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/128463
ISO 639.2: Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages

https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php
Help with Username Registration

https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/twitter-username-rules

License

Disclaimer

Taken from MIT License:

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM,
DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR
OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE
OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.