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 y...

Developing OSINT skills - Sector035's 2020 OSINT quiz walkthrough 13-18


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, used different thought processes, or 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!




13.


Sector035 tells us exactly where we can find the current robot.txt, osintcurio.us/robots.txt.  I want to go there first and take a quick look.  There are many sites that take snapshots of websites on a regular basis and allows us to look at previous versions.  The most popular is probably the internet archive. We can either go there and put osintcurio.us/robots.txt in the search or use a handy dandy browser extension.



There, I go to the first version of the file archived in 2018 and find the date.


14.



Similar to #13 we need to go back in time, this time on the twitter profile of Marco Bereth. Using my handy dandy extension again, I click on the profile link and go to the Internet Archive cache for 2013.  There's no snapshot in July so I go to the next earliest date.



15.



This is a new site to me, great! Added to the bookmarks. I search for "open source intelligence" and find what we're looking for right away.


16.



I'm fairly new to geolocation so this should be fun.  First, I want to look for anything in the image that provides clues to its location. What catches my attention of course in the bright red truck with writing on it.  Most likely a fire truck, from where though?  Googling "feuerwehr" says German fire services.  Great, we found the country!


There's also a walking bridge in the background and a building on the left, other than that and the shape of the top half of the statue from behind to go off of, there's not much. Let's see what a reverse image search brings up.



There is a similar image that looks a lot like the head of our statue.  Let's take a closer look.


That looks to be it, so I follow the link to that image to see where it leads. There I find the image with a title and link to the source on flickr.


And follow that to the original upload on flickr.


The description of the photo tells us what may be the statue name and location! Time to search.


There it is with our statue! Let's take a closer look on street view to confirm and see what the front of our statue looks like.



17.


This was an interesting one. Following the link to Instagram puts the photo of the statues in Oslo, Norway.  My first thought is ok, let me do some googling, how many man and woman statues could there be in Oslo.  You should have saw my face when I found a place in Oslo called Vigeland Park with over 200 statues in a similar style with men and woman, crying babies, and more. Take a look it's pretty amazing. https://vigeland.museum.no/en/vigelandpark 

It has to be in this park right? I search the site and all images of the park with no luck.  I send in the zip code of the park anyway, maybe I missed it. Nope. So I move on to reverse image search and find an image of the statues from the front.


Then click through to the wiki site, then on the photo itself, there is a description.


Great let's Google that.


Oslo Central Station, great!  Let me try my "man woman statue" search again with this to narrow it down and confirm.



There I find a link to the following with exact coordinates and put those in Google maps to get the zip.



18.



I really enjoyed this as I never tried 'chronolocation ', finding the time of day based on location, sun position, or shadows, before this challenge. Luckily, we are given a bunch of clues to help.  


I want to find the location first then determine the time. The Instagram post provides hashtags to help us get there quick, Berlin and Holzmarkt. Let's see where Google maps takes us.   


Right off the bat I notice the smokestacks from the photo.  It looks like everything on that Riverside is labeled Holzmarkt. Based of the smokestacks though it should be down river a little.  I zoom in and look to see if I can spot the shrubbery, pergola, or poll I see in the photo. There's not much shrubbery right on the water like in the photo so I think I find a close spot.


We have to be really close the spot the photo was taken to find the time though and a couple of those spots look like they could be it. I grab the street view icon from the map and happily see many dots light up along that riverside.


The first one I drop is closest to where I think it is and I was so happy to see the same post and pergola from the Instagram photo.  Based on this I know the photo was taken about 20 feet behind this one.  Now I can go to Suncalc and find the same location.


Once on the location, there is a slider on the top of screen to move right and left to position the sun. Based on the photo, I placed the sun just in front of the smokestacks like in the photo.  I was off by a degree or two on the first try, made slight adjustment and was greeted with the final email for Sector035's OSINTquiz2020.

Thank you so much to Sector035 for creating this and to everyone who assisted.  You can find more from Sector035 at https://sector035.nl Looking forward to starting the 2019 quiz next!



3 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 21, 2022

    Hi there, did you enter 287 as your answer? I came up close to this, but can't get any answer I've entered (285, 286, 287, 288, etc) to work... Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gerald CJune 24, 2024

    This was great to read

    ReplyDelete
  3. Brittany HAugust 12, 2024

    Good reading this ppost

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)