OSINT Exercise File #4
Introduction
For this project, I used an exercise from cyber security professional Heath Adam’s Open Source Intelligence Training Course on his Cyber Mentor Youtube channel. In his video, Heath provides three pictures he took with his wife during a trip they took together, and asks a question for each of the photos he gives. For his first photo, he asks “what is the place called?”, the second “What is the name of the hotel he was staying in?” and the third he asks “ What city are they staying in?”. This time I will be breaking up each photo into separate sections to show the work I did to reach the conclusion, checking Heath’s video afterwards to confirm the answers. If my answer was incorrect then I will provide a short explanation as to why I was wrong with my answer.
Part One
In the first photo, Heath and his wife are standing in front of a small park and a building that visibly stand out from the rest of the buildings in the photo. I used Google Images and Yandex to identify the building behind Heath by cropping the photo so that only the roof and structures were shown. Both Google Images and Yandex identified the building as the Trinity Church in Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts. Heath’s video also shows that the photo was from Copley Park.
Part Two
The second photo shows several buildings in the middle of the night, with one building having the word “Westin” visible, along with other indicators that this photo is from the United States, such as the U.S. flag in the corner. As from the previous part, I used both Google Images and Yandex and focused solely on the building in the middle of the photo due to its distinct roof. From my search it appeared that the building in the middle is the Trinity Place Condominiums, located in the Back Bay neighborhood in Boston. After identifying the middle building, I went to Google Maps to check the surrounding areas, where I found that the Westin Copley Place Hotel was nearby, which would match with the Westin building layout sign in the photo. I quickly identified the place that this photo was taken from the Fairmont Copley Plaza, right across the street from the Westin Copley Place Hotel and near the Trinity Place Condos, which would match with Heath’s location in the first photo since the Copley Park was also across the street. Heath’s video confirmed that the hotel he was staying at was the Fairmont Copley Plaza.
Part Three
The final photo is another night in a city, with three identical buildings near one another, a distinct looking building in the corner, and multiple skyscrapers in the background. Since Heath’s question to this photo was “What city is this?” I assumed that this wasn’t Boston, and was deliberately made difficult due a lack of notable signs indicating which city this is. For my search I used Google Images to crop the three buildings on the left side, which was identified as the Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I wanted to double check to confirm if this was Philadelphia, and so I focused on identifying the building to the right, which was identified as the United States Customs House of Philadelphia. This means that this photo is from Philadelphia. Heath’s video also confirmed that this was from Philadelphia, though he found this out by looking at the building with the letters “PSF” on it, and found the PSF building and identified the city that way. I should note that since Google Images now has features to identify certain points of an image, such as cropping and AI searching. This made my search more straightforward than Heath’s search, and this can be explained by noting that Heath’s video came out a few years before these features were implemented into Google Images.