Introduction
Link: https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/osint-exercise-006/
Difficulty:
For beginners: Easy
For experts: EasyBriefing:
On January 19, 2023, a journalist with almost 140k followers on Twitter shared an image of a destroyed vehicle amidst a large cloud of smoke and fire.
The tweet said: "BREAKING: TTP carried out a suicide attack on a police post in Khyber city of Pakistan that killed three Pakistani police officers"
The photo is not of the event described by the journalist.
a) Verify the statement above.
Click [here](https://gralhix.files.wordpress.com/2023/01/osintexercise006.jpeg) to open the photo on a new tab.Attachment:
Solution
It is easy to find the OP (Original Poster) but this is not part of the challenge so I’ll leave this besides.
The challenge tells us that the Tweet posted by the journalist is not what it is pretending to be.
Is it a fake news or a real one?
The tool I love to use when an image/photo is likely to be reused on multiple locations over time is TinEye.
It allows us to see when the image first appeared on the Internet (or at least when it was seen first).
https://tineye.com/search/db9ae911885a8710f14c1bbfa1683405acb55ee1?sort=crawl_date&order=asc&page=1
The article is written in Russian so I used Google Translate to be able to understand it:
It is related to a bombing in Baghdad. But we don’t know if it’s only an illustration image or if it was taken just after the explosion.
Under the photo, someone is credited on Flickr but it’s account is not existing anymore and it has not been saved on Wayback Machine. Or at least, not this one:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/31910792@N05/3178610000/
In 2007 he had almost 11,000 photos on his Flickr account.
It is nearly impossible to retrieve the photo from all of them. We don’t event see the thumbnails.
After that, the user wasn’t active anymore and his account was deactivated.
Thanks to TinEye, there are other websites using this image and giving more information about it: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irakkrigen
The Danish page of Wikipedia related to Iraq war uses this photo and tells us it was taken just after a bombing in Baghdad in 2006.
Anyway, even if we cannot determine a precise date when this photo was taken, we are sure this is not in 2023 as mentioned in the Tweet by the "journalist".
Bonus
I got baited by the first TinEye’s result because it is indicated as a sponsor post so I didn’t click. But when clicking on it, it gives us the exact date of the photo and the location:
We even have the name of the photographer: Eli J. Medellin
Flag
Fake news!