Hey everyone its time for another exercise! So today we are going to take a look at a photo from a news reporter and we will find out where it was taken and the coordinates!
***Warning*** This is for educational purposes only
Task briefing:
In April 2017 Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, the then president of Somalia, visited Turkey. A news agency published a photo where he was seen shaking hands with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country’s president. The article did not disclose where the photo was taken. Your task is to find out the name and coordinates of the location seen below.
So my methodology for finding this location was a bit obscure but it worked! So I decided to do a google image search.
When I entered the image, I saw a few sources but I went to the first news outlet and decided to explore. There is many images as you can see which have similar poses from different times and so we can assume this location is the main place for this type of photo.
So I looked at the site and saw that they put the name of location. Usually when reporters take images they want to give as much detail as possible. So we can see this is the Presidential Palace in Ankara
So this was a huge finding. So I decided to put this into google maps and see what i could find
So we were able to find it on google maps. We can see in the image it has the same layout from the image above so we can be fairly certain we are on the right path!
I tried to use google earth to see if I could zoom in and see if I could replicate the photo, BUT I could not, probably for safety reasons, which is understandable. After I decided to grab the coordinates.
So we right-clicked on the palace and got the coordinates.
I decided to look up details about the palace and see if I can find anything interesting and I did!
We can see that this is the front door of the palace! We can see the ornament on top and two cases where the flag could be and the similar style on the windows, so this confirms our photo from the report.
So our answers are:
Where was the photo taken? Presidential Palace in Ankara Turkey
What are the coordinates of the location? 39.93099, 32.79909
So this concludes my walkthrough for the OSINT challenge! This is a really great challenge to start to find accurate information and learn to look at different perspectives of images!
Thank you and happy gathering.