While digging for more training, I found this new website – Mrs. OSINT – offering geolocation challenges like the ones we have completed up to this point. At the time of this writing, there are only three challenges available. The first two are designed solely for practice, allowing users to get a feel for the types of challenges they will encounter.
For this reason, I will only solve the first two challenges and address the official ones in a separate blog post of their own.
Challenge 1: Mystery
Tasks:
- What is this place called by the locals?
- Where is it located?
- What is this place famous for? (what do they sell)
I started my research by doing a Google reverse image search, but this did not give me the results I was looking for. I decided to try my luck next using the Bing search engine. Bingo.
Above, I pasted the picture I found on Bing from this article. I used red boxes to highlight what I thought were the biggest clues that confirmed this was the right location. The green boxes are the rest of the landmarks I was able to identify in both images.
Let’s take a look together. Red box 1 has the most information inside it. We can see the building has the same color, and same roof inclination. The car at the front seems to be a match with the car in the original picture with top half white and bottom half blue. We can also barely make out the same car seen behind the building in our original picture.
With red box 2 we confirmed presence of the same steel structure towards the left side of the original image. Green box 3 shows the same trail of snow on the mountain from a slightly different angle. Green box 4 shows the lines of what seems to me like some kind of layered contention wall. Green box 5 shows the same kind of dry plants.
Tasks:
1. What is this place called by the locals?
2. Where is it located?
3. What is this place famous for? (what do they sell)
Solutions:
1. “Jigokudani” (the Valley of Hell)
2. Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.
3. Kuro Tamago, aka black hard-boiled eggs.
Challenge 2: Cotton Candy
Tasks:
1. What are the coordinates for where this picture was taken? (yes you can use coordinates of arch)
2. What popular district is this?
3. It’s Friday night, I could go for some cotton candy. Where am I going? What time do they close?
I spotted right away the street name in the picture and went straight to Google Maps and searched for “Takeshita Street”. I clicked on street view and started walking down to the end. I saw a very similar structure with the street name at the top, but the buildings did not match. I was at the opposite end of the street.
Using Google Maps, I went through the historical images and found the one above from October 2017. The red boxes show the obvious matches in both images. Red arrows are extra indicators of having the right location in case we wanted to trust but verify even more. Now that I found the right location, I only had to grab the coordinates from the URL, and the address itself contained the district.
Using the street name and adding cotton candy, a quick Google Maps search provided me with three different candy stores. Out of the three, only Totti Candy Factory seemed to have a heavy focus on cotton candy. You can see in the image below all the cotton candy options available.
Tasks:
1. What are the coordinates for where this picture was taken? (yes you can use coordinates of arch)
2. What popular district is this?
3. It’s Friday night, I could go for some cotton candy. Where am I going? What time do they close?
Solutions:
1. 35°40’17.8″N 139°42’11.2″E.
2. Shibuya.
3. Totti Candy Factory. Closes at 7 pm on Fridays.
This was a fun training exercise! With each new challenge, I feel more and more comfortable in my abilities and the research techniques that I have developed up to this point. I’m eager to see how the challenges will evolve and become more complex over time. I hope you enjoyed it; stay tuned for the upcoming challenges.
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