Developing OSINT skills - Sector035's 2020 OSINT quiz walkthrough 1-6

I really want to thank Sector035 for putting this quiz together, I found it after attending the 2021 SANS OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) Summit and searching for OSINT CTFs and challenges to practice on. Once I started, I couldn't stop until I finished it. Funny thing though, I had no idea how many questions there were until I finished. This quiz consists of 18 challenges that are well thought out, teach lessons in OSINT skills, and demonstrate the time and effort put in to make it valuable to anyone who sets out to complete them. Thank you again Sector035 for this contribution to the OSINT community!

It is time to release the 2020 OSINT Quiz!

This time there won't be anything way too difficult. So if you are just starting out in this field of expertise, or you have colleagues that could use some practice, make sure to send them this info 👇 pic.twitter.com/UZexQZK4rO
— 𝕊𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕠𝕣𝟘𝟛𝟝 (@Sector035) December 30, 2020

This is the third quiz Sector035 has put together and described as the beginner level with the 2019 quiz being intermediate and the 2017 quiz being extremely difficult. I can't wait to get started on 2019 next!

My methods for completing these may not be the most efficient and there are so many ways to find the answers that I'd love to hear how you did it differently, different thought process, and tools. If you are stuck on any of these, please message me on twitter before looking below and I will happily help guide you in the right direction. Let's get started. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Start.

Send a start email to osintquiz2020 [@] gmail [.] com and you get the first question.

So we need to find a tweet by a specific user on a specific day. You could scroll through tweets for who knows how long or do an advanced search. Twitter has built in advanced search via https://twitter.com/search-advanced?lang=en to quickly find the tweet.

1.

Again we go to twitter advanced search and add the username, hashtag, and date.

2.

Similar to the last two, we need to find a post on Instagram on a specific date. I couldn't find a tool quickly to search Instagram by date, luckily it didn't take long to scroll through the posts and find the right date. I am going to look for a better way to do this in the future, in case scrolling through would take a while. Then a quick google search on how to view the json of an Instagram post and we have it.

3.

My Google Fu isn't bad and found it on the first try putting together what I thought were the primary keywords from the question.

4.

For this question we will need to reverse image search the photo. I like Yandex for this type of image, Bing, Tineye, and Google are good for others. Uploading the photo to Yandex shows links to Getty in the top results, going there we find the file name.

5.

I wasn't sure the best way to find metadata for youtube videos, a quick Google search and I landed at mattw.io/youtube-metadata/ which will give you the date and time the video was published from its metadata.

6.

Similar to 4, I think Yandex is best for this type of image. Pop the image into Yandex, scroll down and there is a link to a wiki page.

I send in the author's name "dktue" but it doesn't work. I notice this image is at a very slightly different angle than the original. However, there is good information in the description. Throw that into Yandex as well...