Today we will look at Gralhix’s seventh OSINT exercise. So far, each challenge has brought a unique blend of critical thinking, creativity, and research techniques, making them both engaging and rewarding to solve. Let’s take a look at today’s challenge.
OSINT Exercise #007
Task 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?
Like usual, I started my investigation with a reverse image search. Given the uniqueness of the structure, I thought this would save me a lot of time by taking me straight to the right location. I found a picture that was taken in Lisboa and was tagged as “Centro Comercial Vasco da Gama, Lisboa, Portugal.” Went to Google Maps and confirmed I had the right location.
The first thing I noticed after the structure was that the poster was different from the original one. I could not be at ease and had to skip to the third question next.
I zoomed in on the poster from the original image and made out the word “Tutankhamun”. I searched for “Tutankhamun Lisboa Portugal” in hopes of finding the exact poster from the image, but the closest I found was this picture from a YouTube video.
Not the same picture as the poster but really close. It also has a link that could possibly be the same as the one we need.
At this point, I thought it might take a little more digging to find the right picture and decided to answer our second question instead. From our YouTube discovery, we now also had a lead as to which year the picture could have been taken.
I navigated to Google Maps and, using the street view, I went to the closest street view available (1), then the middle one (2), and lastly the farthest one (3). This one had the most historical images, and it also contained the poster we are looking for.
From the historical picture in Google Maps, we can match two things to what we found on YouTube: the date (April 19, 2019) and the URL. The link from the historical image was not very readable, but we can make out enough to know it is the same URL as the one we found in the video.
If this does not convince you, there is something else we can try. Using the Wayback Machine again, we can search for www.tutankamon.pt and try to find the poster on their official website. The website does not have the poster, but it does have a Facebook logo.
Clicking the logo did not give me access to the Facebook page, but a quick Google dork did. After getting to the page and scrolling down, I confirmed that the URL we found was, in fact, the correct one.
Tasks:
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?
Solutions:
a. Vasco da Gama Shopping Centre in Lisboa, Portugal.
b. The picture was taken in 2019.
c. The link in the poster is for: www.tutankamon.pt
Once again, Sofia Santos delivers an excellent exercise. I found myself trying to skip to different questions because of how involved I was during this exercise. I just wanted to get all of the answers all at once.
I enjoyed how I had to be creative and mix some of my tools in order to find the right answers. This exercise also made me realize how one spot in Street View, even if really close to another spot, might have much more data from user-submitted pictures.
I hope you also learned something new today. Stay tuned for similar content!
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