“In this room we will be exploring the discipline of IMINT/GEOINT, which is short for Image intelligence and geospatial intelligence. This room is suited for those of you who are just beginning your OSINT journey or those brand new to the field of IMINT/GEOINT.”
Click HERE for a link to the room.
Task 2: What is the name of the street where this image was taken?
The first one is fairly obvious, but tries to teach you how to use context clues within images. The answer is Carnaby Street.
Task 3 moves on to using Google to find information, and introduces us to Google Dorking.
Question 1: Which city is the tube station located in?
I recognized it as London immediately, but I Googled “Circus Street London Underground” just to make sure, and came up with the “Piccadilly Circus Tube Station”.
I then used Google maps at street level to make sure I had the exact same one:
You can see the buildings in the background are exactly the same. So the answer is indeed London.
Question #2: Which tube station do these stairs lead to?
Seems we have already answered this one, it’s Piccadilly Circus.
Question #3: Which year did this station open?
For this question you can use that Wikipedia page that we pulled up earlier. It states that the station was opened on 10 March, 1906.
Question #4: How many platforms are there in this station?
Again, use that Wikipedia page, and you will see that it has 4 platforms.
Task 4 is more of the same, using context clues within images to find the correct Google search terms.
Question #1 Which building is this photo taken in?
The only thing you can really Google here is “YVR CONNECTS”. From here you will find a result for Vancouver International Airport.
Question #2: Which country is this building located in?
Using those Wikipedia results, or just your knowledge of basic geography, we can deduce that the airport is in Canada.
Question #3: Which city is this building located in?
Using the above image retrieved from the Wikipedia page, you can see that it is located in Richmond.
Task 5 gets a bit more difficult, and has two pictures to work with instead of one.
“A friend of mine contacted me asking if I could help them locate a coffee shop that is supposed to serve the best lunch there is. They told me the coffee shop is somewhere in Scotland, and he sent me these two pictures. Do you think you could locate it and answer the questions below for me?”
Question 1: Which city is this coffee shop located in?
Now the reason I say it is more difficult is because “The Edinburgh Woolen Mill” is actually a very popular chain store, with locations all over Britain.
The instructions DO narrow it down to just Scotland, but as you can see by the store locator tool, there are still quite a few to consider:
The other clue I had to work with was that it served the “BEST lunch there is.”
So I used these search terms:
This wasn’t it. Back to the drawing board.
Am I really going to have to go through all those stores and use street view?
OK, so here I am. I am just going to click on each one and then a view of the storefront should pop-up. I will match the store-front to the second picture we received.
It ended up taking about 10 or so before I saw one that was obviously on a corner like the picture provided, in a town called Blairgowrie.
Here’s a close-up. Yeah, that’s definitely it, because the same street sign is here.
So now I just need to turn around and I should see the lunch spot:
If you pull up the pictures from inside the coffee shop, you can see that even the light fixtures match:
Question #2: Which street is this coffee shop located in?
The Wee Coffee Shop says it is located on Allan Street.
Question #2: What is their phone number?
You can see the phone number in the above graphic, +447878 839128
Question #3: What is their email address?
If you click on the website, it will take you to a Facebook page that has some more contact information:
Ahhh, AOL still? Bold move.
Question #4: What is the surname of the owners?
If you search for, “the wee coffee shop blairgowrie owners”, the second result will show that their surname is “Cochrane”.
Task 6 starts getting into reverse image searching, and recommends reading THIS write-up before you attempt the challenge.
Here is the image:
My first thought is to just crop the image and use the ceiling. This is what I got after using Google Images:
Here’s a photo from a news article that those search results linked to. Yes, it is definitely the right one:
Question #1: Which restaurant was this picture taken at?
We got the right restaurant above, but the answer format wants an abbreviated nickname, “Katz’s Deli”.
This was kind of confusing at first because the restaurant has apparently changed it’s name many times through-out the years and goes by a variety of things, but eventually I got the right one.
Question #2: What is the name of the Bon Appétit editor that worked 24 hours at this restaurant?
I used these search terms to find the name, Andrew Knowlton.
Task 7 is supposed to use all of the skills from above to find a crazy looking motorcycle-elk sculpture.
I figure it’s unique enough to be easy to find.:
Check out the third image, the black and white one. That appears to be correct.
Question #1: What is the name of this statue?
Upon closer inspection of the third image, it looks to be a stock photo of a sculpture in Oslo.
By pulling up the related images, I am able to find even more information:
Looks like it is called “Rudolph the Chrome Nosed Reindeer”
Question #2 Who took this image?
So I have a bunch of images of the sculpture, but I need to find who took the exact one.
Using a Google image search just brought up a bunch of walkthroughs for the room, lol.
In the interest of not cheating, I kept looking, starting with the two websites that popped up:
The second one took me to a page about all the outdoor sculptures in Oslo:
I basically just clicked around randomly until I found Rudolph:
It gives image credit to Kjersti Stensrud.
Task 8 kicks it up a notch.
“This challenge is a step up in difficulty from the previous challenges and you shouldn’t expect to solve this quickly, especially if you are new to IMINT. While you can certainly apply the techniques and tools you’ve used so far, this challenge may force you to revise your thinking and your approach while you’re working on solving this challenge.
I highly recommend watching this Ted talk by Amy Herman on visual intelligence — “A lesson on looking” if you want a unique view on how you perceive visual data.”
Ok, so I’m off to watch the video and eat some lunch to fortify myself for this…
Question #1 What is the name of the character that the statue depicts?
To me, this was obviously depicting Lady Justice. She is often seen weighing the scales of justice with a blind eye, in order to be impartial.
Question #2: Where is this statue located?
I started off by doing a Google image search for this image, which brought up a news article:
In the article, credit for the photo is not given, but it does mention The US Department of Justice.
I started thinking this could be a statue in front of that building, since it does depict Lady Justice.
I used Google street view and checked around the building, but it seems I was incorrect in my assumption.
I started wondering why more hits didn’t come up with a reverse image search on Google. You would think many people would be taking photos of an interesting sculpture like this, especially since it appears to be outside.
I switched over to Yandex, which can often bring up more results than Google.
Ok, here we are:
These results brought me to THIS video, which was in Russian, but has a couple more shots of the statue for better context.
Zooming in on that still, I can definitely see it says “United States Court”, but I can’t make out what’s in front of that.
My next step was to do an image search on that still from the video, which brought up a few results:
Much better!
From this we can see it is located in Alexandria, Virginia.
Question #3: What is the name of the building opposite from this statue?
With the address, I just pulled it up in Google maps and looked around. Directly across the street sits The Westin Alexandria Old Town.
I’m not sure if I made that more difficult than it needed to be, but eventually I found it!
The last task moves on to geolocation in videos.
“Geolocating videos aren’t much different from geolocating images. A video is just a string of images, usually played at 24 frames(or images) per second. In other words, a video will hold a whole lot more images that can be analyzed, reversed and scrutinized by you.”
Sounds like that’s what I already did for the last task, haha.
“Here’s a good writeup by Nixintel on a tool called FFmpeg, which will help you extract the key images from the video that you may need to solve this challenge. Download the attached video and follow Nixintel’s guide!”
I actually got a nice Kali VM from TraceLabs that is specifically for OSINT stuff, so I decided to install FFmpeg on there.
I watched the video first though, before I started using any tools. The camera person zooms in on “Riverside Point” and a couple other things to help me orient myself:
But the thing that stood out was of course, this:
This showed that they were located in Singapore:
After setting my map to Singapore, I searched for Riverside Point, because the video shows that they are just right across a canal from it:
It looks to be this building right here, because you can see the color of the brick and also the different colored houses from the video at street level.
It is called the Novotel Singapore Clarke Quay, but interestingly, the name doesn’t really show up on Google maps as a location, you have to zoom in on the building to even see it.
So…I’m kind of disappointed I didn’t use the video technique that this hint is talking about?
It looks like the FFmpeg is just for extracting images, which I ended up doing myself just by taking screenshots of key frames.
If anyone knows what tool is being referred to here, please leave me a comment!
Happy Hacking! ❤
