What is OSINT?
If you’re unfamiliar with the term OSINT it stands for Open Source Intelligence. Its often used by law enforcement, the U.S Military, ethical penetration testers, and criminals in order to gather information about a target and develop a profile. The information is found on the internet using special tools or google dorking. The profiles can be used to locate missing people or fugitives, locate terrorists, or help penetration testers during a security audit.
SOLUTION BELOW
When was the photo taken?
It’s not immediately obvious when a photo could have been taken. If it hasn’t been scrubbed out already we might look at EXIF data or notice a literal indicator of the time. Most social media sites remove the useful EXIF data to protect users so we won’t look there.
Let’s start by looking at the Washington Monument. There seems to be some kind of renovation going on. I bet a Google search will bring something up.
Google: Washington Monument Scaffolding
Sure enough, I was able to find an article about the renovation. From June 20th, 2013 until November 2013 the Washington monument had scaffolding around it. The scaffolding is covered in a fabric that gives it a brick appearance.
We have a window of time but I think we can do better.
It’s a nice day. The trees still have leaves. Some people are in T-Shirt and shorts but most people are wearing long sleeve shirts and long pants. We can check the weather for the months in our range. It looks like June had an average of 90 for the month.
We won’t see the majority of people wearing that type of clothing until the average temperature is in the 60's.
The weather for September sounds about right and its not quite late enough for the leaves to start changing colors. We can compare this photo of the White House to other photos taken in September and see that the leaves are just as green.
So far, my guess is late September.
Marc Krueger posted this challenge on the QuizTime Twitter page so lets check his posts and see if we can’t find anything else.
Using Twitter’s advanced search feature we can look at Marc’s post from September 1, 2013 to October 31, 2013.
This will be our search parameter
(from:Kollege) until:2013–10–31 since:2013–09–01
After some scrolling we come across this post and can see that Marc Krueger was in DC on September 30th 2013. I think it’s fair to assume that the photo in our challenge was taken around that same time. I messaged Marc with my guess and he confirmed that it was taken then.
Hopefully you found this informative and inspiring. Take on some OSINT challenges! It’s a great skill to have with a small community and it’s a lot of fun.
You can find me @L15t3Nr on Twitter