OSINT Exercise 007

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.

Attachment:

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.

French:

Greek:

Turkish:

Portugese:

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?

Then I tried with lisbon:

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/