Welcome to our 8th OSINT exercise created by Sofia Santos. This time, I had to leverage a tool I don’t normally get to use and get familiar with a web extension that facilitated text translations within articles. Let’s start our investigation.
OSINT Exercise #008
Task briefing:
The large photo below was taken from a page of the Epoch Times, a Chinese newspaper.
Please answer the following questions:
a) What was the audience applauding?
b) When was the photo taken?
c) What is the name of the venue?
The first thing I did was copy the title in the image and paste it into Google. This immediately gave me multiple results, and one of them shared a cropped version of the image from our challenge and came from the Epoch Times.
As you can see from the image above, the title of this article was “Shen Yun Norfolk had two full performances on Saturday, and the audience thanked the Creator.” Whatever the audience was applauding, it was related to Shen Yun and possibly located in Norfolk, Virginia, and it sold out two performances that Saturday.
The article was published on January 9, 2023, and the title says the performance took place on a Saturday. Assuming the article was published soon after the performance, we can guess the picture was probably taken on January 7, 2023.
Now I had enough information to continue my investigation, but first I wanted to confirm the date of the picture. I opened up a terminal and used exiftool to see if there was any metadata in the image. There was. See the screenshot below for date confirmation.
I used the information found within the article’s title and searched for “Shen Yun Norfolk 2023” and found the Seven Venues website. Hint, hint. If I were going to find the venue name, it had to be here.
On the left side, we can match the date we thought the event took place and learn that it also performed on the 8th. The venue was Chrysler Hall, and the performance title on the promotional video was China Before Communism Shen Yun 2023.
Using their calendar, we can visualize the performance times for each day: 2 PM and 7:30 PM on Saturday and 2 PM on Sunday.
Tasks:
a. What was the audience applauding?
b. When was the photo taken?
c. What is the name of the venue?
Solutions:
a. Based on the date and time found in the metadata, the audience was probably applauding the first “China Before Communism Shen Yun 2023” performance on Saturday.
b. The picture was taken on January 7, 2023.
c. The venue was the Chrysler Hall.
I hope you enjoyed this OSINT exercise as much as I did. It pushed me out of my comfort zone by giving me the opportunity to conduct research even when the information was written in a different language, which forced me to think creatively and add new tools to my toolkit.
Let me know your thoughts in the comment section. Stay tuned for more exercises like this one.
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