Introduction
Link: https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/osint-exercise-007/
Difficulty:
For beginners: a) Easy, b) Medium, c) Hard
For experts: a) Easy, b) Medium, c) Medium
Briefing:
The photo below was taken a few years ago in a beautiful city.
Your task is to find the answers to the following questions:
a) Where was the photo taken?
b) In which year was the photo taken?
c) The big poster on the right contained a link to a website. What was the link?
Click [here](https://gralhix.files.wordpress.com/2023/02/osintexercise007.png) to open photo on a new window.
Solution
From the briefing, we know the photo was taken a few years ago so the poster could have changed. Same for the king of structure that is in the middle of the photo (in case this is a temporary art exposition).
Here are some elements we can deduce from the photo:
There are some european flags (orange) so there is a big chance we are in Europe.
The city in which the photo was taken is near a sea of an ocean (blue), or at least water.
There is a very recognizable metal structure (green). I’m already 99% sure the location will be found thanks to it.
The buildings are white and the sidewalks are very bright meaning we are probably in a southern city (Spain, Greece, etc…)
Finally, the poster on the right tells us there is a "Tutankamon" exposition. The orthograph of "Tutankhamun" can give us an idea of the language.
If we look at the europe map, we could identify some cities to be good candidates:
Of course, here we are only guessing cities without much information. But it could lead to potential findings.
Thanks to the orthograph of the poster, some countries can be eliminated.
All four orthographs of "Tutankhamun" don’t correspond to the poster. So we might not be in one of these countries.
It matches with spanish (except the accent):
But we did not investigate the strange metal structure.
If our main guess is madrid we can try something like: madrid metal structure
The results are inconclusive so we modify the request to remove some words, until finding something interesting:madrid metal structure -palace -bridge -airport
Event with this request, impossible to find a photo of the structure.
Replace madrid
with spain
: same result.
Maybe we made a mistake with the orthograph of the poster?
It reminds me something… The structure we are looking for!
If we click on it, we get some juicy information:
Using Google Street View, we can find the exact spot where the photo was taken:
We are a bit on the left of the iron structure so it can’t be the left escalator.
We find the same elements except for the poster which is not "Tutankamon":
But the street view is from October 2022. We know the picture was taken a few years ago (told in the briefing).
So let’s try to change the timeframe:
In 2019 we find the poster and the website related to the exposition: https://tutankamon.pt/
Of course if you wanted to speedrun this challenge, you could have used Google Lens and directly found the location.
Flag
a) 38.767704, -9.096135
b) 2019
c) https://tutankamon.pt/