Yandex is understandably an under-looked resource with regards to Digital Investigations, especially since most people tend to rely on western-based email and digital services providers such as Outlook, Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo. That said, there are many reasons as to why searches should be extended towards Yandex, especially when such investigations may be focused on a suspect with links to Russia or Belarus.

With all that said, we should now introduce our readers to ‘Ya Seeker’, a very lightweight and simple Python-based script that enables Digital Investigators to run a search against a username or Yandex email address and retrieve a range of account information including:

• Full name
• User photo
• The user’s gender
• Yandex UID
• Yandex Public ID
• Linked social accounts
• User activity (count of reviews, comments; subscribers and subscriptions)
• Account features (whether the account is verified, banned, deleted, etc.)

Additionally, the account will query several Yandex services in order to identify whether the target account is subscribed to such services. The type of services include:

• Music
• Collections (a service where users can share ideas and inspiration – akin to Pinterest)
• Bugbounty (where users can report vulnerabilities within Yandex’s services)
• Reviews (akin to Google Reviews)
• Q / Znatoki (a question and answer service)
• O (a Russian classifieds service)
• Zen (a recommendations service)
• Market (a service to sell items)
• Messenger

Installing ‘Ya Seeker’ is very straightforward through the command-line interface. Deploying the tool is just as easy by invoking python3 yaseeker.py <your target username / email address>. What we particularly like about this tool is that no API is required in order to conduct searches. That said, some of the service-based searches require users to login into Yandex, retrieve the session cookies within Netscape format, then save the cookies into a file named cookies.txt within the tool’s directory. To sum up this article, ‘Ya Seeker’ is a very nice simple tool that can be used to obtain information concerning Yandex users and it comes with our recommendation.