I can't talk about the specifics of this investigation, but it is indeed REAL. A private investigator reached out to me recently and asked if I could find the location of a screenshot from a video on Instagram.

No logos.
No street signs.
No obvious clues as to where the image was taken.

Armed with a single piece of spurious intelligence, it was solved in under an hour.

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Hey welcome back to the channel my name is Gary I'm a cyber security professional by day 1 day maybe I'll tell you what I do by night.

Earlier this year a private investigator that I know reached out to me to give him a hand geolocating an image.

This is a real case that had real implications in the real world.

So it's not some theoretical OSINT challenge from popular hacking type websites.

So if you wanna see how I did it in under an hour, let's check it out.

All right, so as you can see, this video was uploaded to Instagram at 11 minutes past 6 on November 29th 2022.

There's a little football icon and there's also a TV screen with this massive purple and yellow circle on the floor.

I imagine that's some sort of paint or sheet or maybe it's CGI, I don't know, but there's clearly some sort of football match going on here.

And if we just look at the date, November 29th, 2022.

What was on FIFA World Cup 2022 highlights?

Okay, so it looks like the World Cup was on, which football match is on?

Netherlands versus Qatar Wales versus England That would be pretty suspect for me Little bit of background here We don't know Where this is obviously that's why I'm trying to locate it.

But we know that the person who wants it to be found, their postcode is a Leeds postcode.

If I just open up Leeds UK maps, here it is.

So it's sort of in the middle of the UK, outside of Manchester, outside of Sheffield, pretty big area but it isn't too far to go to Manchester or Sheffield or York or Harrogate or any of the little places around Leeds and in fact many people on nights out, clubbing, partying etc would have no problem traveling for 1 hour down to Manchester, Sheffield, whatever to find friends and go to a bar to watch the World Cup.

So we're making an assumption that this is more likely to be in Leeds because the person requesting it is in Leeds and hopefully those 2 things connect And that's really all we have to go on.

So what we can do is we can take this image and put it into Google Image Search.

And if I just take a little screenshot, and then images.google.com, and just drag that on there.

Now we can crop the image a little bit to just sort of show the TV and the wall to see if that helps.

And you can see there, there's some pink lines on this wall.

But again, it's not the result that we're looking for.

The TV is way too big for a start so just scrolling through these I'm not seeing any great results and to be honest I wouldn't expect to find any great results.

You know if this was a picture of a nice building from the outside or something then yeah maybe you could maybe that would work in Google Images but we're just getting the general vibe of places here.

And the same goes for Yandex and Bing probably.

If we come back here, take this image, Go to Yandex, drag it in.

It just sort of sees the TV and the green, so it recognizes that it's football, but that's it.

So let's just give up on trying to do reverse image search.

So here's Leeds on a map, and let's just pop back here and do some basic image analysis.

And we break the image down into chunks when we do this.

You look at the foreground, the middle ground, and the background.

The foreground here for me, and this is a bit subjective, you can make the foreground whatever you want, but it's the stuff that's closest to the camera.

So there is a rounded edge, probably black glass table here, which is reflecting the TV.

The middle ground I'm gonna call the rest of the image, the building.

And the background is this stuff where my mouse is here.

That's actually outside, outside a window.

This TV is mounted into a big window frame or a door frame potentially and we'll come to that in a second.

If I just move myself up here and grab the ellipse stroke we're gonna make it a bit thicker.

I spent some time in the Middle East but you can get this stuff everywhere these days.

So on the top you've got these little embers, glowing coal sort of embers on top of some tin foil and then a tube and then you got this little ashtray to catch it and then underneath the table with the reflection of the table the reflection on top shows the inverted image of the top of the shisha pipe but underneath that probably all the way down to the floor would be the rest of this shisha so let's just jump over here and I'll show you that hookah pipe here we go There it is.

So that is that for sure, without a doubt.

So we know we're in a Shisha bar, a hookah bar, maybe some sort of Middle Eastern restaurant type place.

So we could search for Leeds Middle Eastern restaurants, Leeds, shisha bars, shisha cafes.

We could even try and go through Twitter and try and do some clever searches to find images that were taken and uploaded at locations like that on the World Cup days, but that's a bit more tricky, so let's just do the simple stuff first.

We've also got the TV, which we've identified as the World Cup, probably England v Wales.

We could go and watch the match on YouTube and figure that out, but pretty happy.

You got these wall panel things here, these lights, and then these black bars.

And if you look, the black bars here are thinner than the black bars over here.

And that would imply to me that they are, they're not painted strips, they're actually like wooden beams or plastic beams stuck onto the wall and they appear to curve near the top.

So if you look up here at the top you can see it starts to sort of curve out.

As we're over here, you can't see it because it's more head on with the camera.

So some sort of curvy roof with lights probably going along it.

That's a reflection of these pink bars going along the roof.

So we're starting to picture in our mind what this might look like.

Walls with these 3 black bars and then these neon type lights going up along the roof.

I would also imagine that these lights can change colour and be multi-coloured and things like that, probably.

Normally with like the lights that I have here in the studio, you either get a plain light which just is white and you can change the tint to be slightly more yellow or not, or you get an RGB light, which can be any color.

And if it's pink, it's probably an RGB light.

So I'm gonna guess that when we're looking online, we can expect to find more than just pink.

So that's an idea as to what the room might look like.

And if I just turn that here that is looking into the outside world because we know that's a glass panel and you can also see, if I just delete these and zoom in here, Actually let's put 1 of them back and make it a bit smaller.

To me those look like sliding door handles.

You put your hand in there and you slide the door open or you slide the window open.

They're at the same height and they match.

So I think some sort of window or door that slides.

If it's to the outside world, it could be both a window or a door.

I mean, that'd be a very big window if it's gonna have a big TV like that, but it could be a window, especially if it's a business, which we're pretty sure that it is, not someone's house.

So yeah, that is clearly some sort of sliding apparatus, likely a black frame.

Now what we can do is we can click on that image layer and I can hit Command M and it brings up this curves adjustments.

Normally in photography you would darken the dark bits and lighten the light bits and it gives it a contrast boost.

We could lighten the dark bits and just see if we can see more things.

Do we get any more information just by boosting that up?

These little white dots with lines coming off them and this horizontal line.

That could be a useful thing to try and find later down the line.

Okay so we've got a TV mounted in a window frame doorway.

We've got this room that has these 3 black beams that curves along the roof and then there's neon lights breaking all that up.

It is a shisha cafe, a hookah lounge, maybe in Leeds.

Jump back over here And you can see I've already got this Halo Lounge thing up.

I was also afraid that they might delete the Instagram channel for some reason.

If times are tough, the channel might disappear.

And bear in mind this is just in the Leeds area.

I scrolled down this list to see if anything jumped out and as you scroll down the page you see this.

So you know that that's a pretty bad photograph because it's at a weird angle.

It's not at the angle that we saw previously you know straight vertical lines but because we thought through everything it's not pink for a start it's blue but we already talked about it's pink, so it's maybe an RGB light, so we could maybe expect other colors.

We've also got a few black bars in between those lights.

In the top left, is that maybe a TV there?

Already from this 1 image alone, we're pretty sure that this is a strong contender.

And clicking that button links you off to the Instagram profile.

So here it is, Halo Lounge and if we scroll through this we get some nice food, coffee, photography But at the bottom here, back in the day when they launched, they put some of these photographs up.

I wonder if we go back to this photograph.

If we zoom in, maybe turn that curves adjustment back on.

That might be some of this pattern that we're seeing here on the wall.

That might be that brick wall reflecting behind us, potentially.

Oh, there is our slidey window door type thing, but there's no TV in front of that 1 but there is a TV here in front of this 1.

Same black frame with some sort of window door panels inside of it.

So I reckon that TV there is this TV here.

And if we look, the photographer has a table there's there's the TV and there seems to be some sort of seats over underneath the TV there.

But then there's also this seating in between our table and the TV and its table underneath it.

So I think we're on the far side with our back right against the wall.

And it goes all the colors under the sun.

How do we move forward to maybe get some sort of confirmation.

Let's zoom in on it and have a look at the area.

So drag Street View onto here And here we go.

Entryways into buildings are covered by glass.

Sorry, covered by shutters, so the doors here on the left and the right.

And then I guess these are all just window bays, not sliding door bays, sliding window bays.

And if we spin around, we can see Grove Cafe and we get to see this wonky 20 miles per hour sign.

And if we go back here and we just zoom in do you see this?

You've got if I just move myself again just there, outside Does that look like a wonky 20 miles an hour sign to you?

It's at an angle and it's got this curvature on it, what are the chances that that is that sign?

So there you have it, those are the exact steps that I took to figure out where that image was taken in under an hour.

Now my buddy had to go there physically and confirm that is actually the right location and it is the right location.

But as you can see it was a pretty manual process to get there.

Sometimes you gotta get some search results and then just go through them manually which can be time consuming but that's the nature of the OSINT game.

So keep practicing, I'll see you next time


Speaker 0: Hey welcome back to the channel my name is Gary I'm a cyber security professional by day 1 day maybe I'll tell you what I do by night. Earlier this year a private investigator that I know reached out to me to give him a hand geolocating an image. This is a real case that had real implications in the real world. So it's not some theoretical OSINT challenge from popular hacking type websites. So if you wanna see how I did it in under an hour, let's check it out.

All right, so as you can see, this video was uploaded to Instagram at 11 minutes past 6 on November 29th 2022. There it is. There's a little football icon and there's also a TV screen with this massive purple and yellow circle on the floor. I imagine that's some sort of paint or sheet or maybe it's CGI, I don't know, but there's clearly some sort of football match going on here. And if we just look at the date, November 29th, 2022.

Let's see what we find. What was on FIFA World Cup 2022 highlights? Okay, so it looks like the World Cup was on, which football match is on? Netherlands versus Qatar Wales versus England That would be pretty suspect for me Little bit of background here We don't know Where this is obviously that's why I'm trying to locate it. But we know that the person who wants it to be found, their postcode is a Leeds postcode.

Leeds is a city in the UK. If I just open up Leeds UK maps, here it is. So it's sort of in the middle of the UK, outside of Manchester, outside of Sheffield, pretty big area but it isn't too far to go to Manchester or Sheffield or York or Harrogate or any of the little places around Leeds and in fact many people on nights out, clubbing, partying etc would have no problem traveling for 1 hour down to Manchester, Sheffield, whatever to find friends and go to a bar to watch the World Cup. So we're making an assumption that this is more likely to be in Leeds because the person requesting it is in Leeds and hopefully those 2 things connect And that's really all we have to go on. So what we can do is we can take this image and put it into Google Image Search.

And if I just take a little screenshot, and then images.google.com, and just drag that on there. We don't get much. This isn't a great set of results. Now we can crop the image a little bit to just sort of show the TV and the wall to see if that helps. And you can see there, there's some pink lines on this wall.

But again, it's not the result that we're looking for. The TV is way too big for a start so just scrolling through these I'm not seeing any great results and to be honest I wouldn't expect to find any great results. It's such a low quality image. You know if this was a picture of a nice building from the outside or something then yeah maybe you could maybe that would work in Google Images but we're just getting the general vibe of places here. And the same goes for Yandex and Bing probably.

If we come back here, take this image, Go to Yandex, drag it in. Yep. Same deal. Nothing popping out. It just sort of sees the TV and the green, so it recognizes that it's football, but that's it.

So let's just give up on trying to do reverse image search. So here's Leeds on a map, and let's just pop back here and do some basic image analysis. And we break the image down into chunks when we do this. You look at the foreground, the middle ground, and the background. The foreground here for me, and this is a bit subjective, you can make the foreground whatever you want, but it's the stuff that's closest to the camera.

It's this table. So there is a rounded edge, probably black glass table here, which is reflecting the TV. The middle ground I'm gonna call the rest of the image, the building. And the background is this stuff where my mouse is here. That's actually outside, outside a window.

This TV is mounted into a big window frame or a door frame potentially and we'll come to that in a second. If I just move myself up here and grab the ellipse stroke we're gonna make it a bit thicker. Fill, Let's kill the fill. This thing right here. What is that?

I spent some time in the Middle East but you can get this stuff everywhere these days. That is a shisha or a hookah. So on the top you've got these little embers, glowing coal sort of embers on top of some tin foil and then a tube and then you got this little ashtray to catch it and then underneath the table with the reflection of the table the reflection on top shows the inverted image of the top of the shisha pipe but underneath that probably all the way down to the floor would be the rest of this shisha so let's just jump over here and I'll show you that hookah pipe here we go There it is. So that is that for sure, without a doubt. Looks exactly like it.

So we know we're in a Shisha bar, a hookah bar, maybe some sort of Middle Eastern restaurant type place. So that gives us some more clues. So we could search for Leeds Middle Eastern restaurants, Leeds, shisha bars, shisha cafes. We could even try and go through Twitter and try and do some clever searches to find images that were taken and uploaded at locations like that on the World Cup days, but that's a bit more tricky, so let's just do the simple stuff first. So we've got this hookup pipe here.

We've also got the TV, which we've identified as the World Cup, probably England v Wales. We could go and watch the match on YouTube and figure that out, but pretty happy. You got these wall panel things here, these lights, and then these black bars. And if you look, the black bars here are thinner than the black bars over here. And that would imply to me that they are, they're not painted strips, they're actually like wooden beams or plastic beams stuck onto the wall and they appear to curve near the top.

So if you look up here at the top you can see it starts to sort of curve out. It's noticeable on that light. As we're over here, you can't see it because it's more head on with the camera. So some sort of curvy roof with lights probably going along it. And you can see that here in the glass.

You see the pink lines here? That's on the roof. That's a reflection of these pink bars going along the roof. So we're starting to picture in our mind what this might look like. Walls with these 3 black bars and then these neon type lights going up along the roof.

I would also imagine that these lights can change colour and be multi-coloured and things like that, probably. Normally with like the lights that I have here in the studio, you either get a plain light which just is white and you can change the tint to be slightly more yellow or not, or you get an RGB light, which can be any color. And if it's pink, it's probably an RGB light. No 1 just buys a pink light generally. So I'm gonna guess that when we're looking online, we can expect to find more than just pink.

So that's an idea as to what the room might look like. And then this is the outside world here. All of this here. And if I just turn that here that is looking into the outside world because we know that's a glass panel and you can also see, if I just delete these and zoom in here, Actually let's put 1 of them back and make it a bit smaller. You see this?

And it's got a little friend over here. To me those look like sliding door handles. You put your hand in there and you slide the door open or you slide the window open. They're at the same height and they match. There's 2 of them.

So I think some sort of window or door that slides. If it's to the outside world, it could be both a window or a door. I mean, that'd be a very big window if it's gonna have a big TV like that, but it could be a window, especially if it's a business, which we're pretty sure that it is, not someone's house. So yeah, that is clearly some sort of sliding apparatus, likely a black frame. Now what we can do is we can click on that image layer and I can hit Command M and it brings up this curves adjustments.

Normally in photography you would darken the dark bits and lighten the light bits and it gives it a contrast boost. But here we could do the invert. We could lighten the dark bits and just see if we can see more things. See that? Look into the background.

What can we see? Does anything pop out at us? Do we get any more information just by boosting that up? Not a wild amount. This interests me though.

These little white dots with lines coming off them and this horizontal line. That could be a useful thing to try and find later down the line. So let's just turn that off again. Okay so we've got a TV mounted in a window frame doorway. We've got this room that has these 3 black beams that curves along the roof and then there's neon lights breaking all that up.

It is a shisha cafe, a hookah lounge, maybe in Leeds. Okay so let's take a look. Jump back over here And you can see I've already got this Halo Lounge thing up. I didn't want to waste anybody's time. I was also afraid that they might delete the Instagram channel for some reason.

If times are tough, the channel might disappear. So I've kept that here. Let's do a search. Shisha. And what do we get?

Quite a few. And bear in mind this is just in the Leeds area. Quite a few. And this is what I did. I scrolled down this list to see if anything jumped out and as you scroll down the page you see this.

So you know that that's a pretty bad photograph because it's at a weird angle. It's not at the angle that we saw previously you know straight vertical lines but because we thought through everything it's not pink for a start it's blue but we already talked about it's pink, so it's maybe an RGB light, so we could maybe expect other colors. That's what we've got. We've also got a few black bars in between those lights. We're gonna count them in a second.

In the top left, is that maybe a TV there? Already from this 1 image alone, we're pretty sure that this is a strong contender. And clicking that button links you off to the Instagram profile. So here it is, Halo Lounge and if we scroll through this we get some nice food, coffee, photography But at the bottom here, back in the day when they launched, they put some of these photographs up. And 1 of them is a video.

So let's take a look. Here we go. Boom. We got a bay window or a door. We got this brick wall behind us.

That's quite interesting. I wonder if we go back to this photograph. If we zoom in, maybe turn that curves adjustment back on. That might be some of this pattern that we're seeing here on the wall. That might be that brick wall reflecting behind us, potentially.

Let's click play. Got the curve on the roof. Oh, there is our slidey window door type thing, but there's no TV in front of that 1 but there is a TV here in front of this 1. There it is. Same deal though.

Same black frame with some sort of window door panels inside of it. So I reckon that TV there is this TV here. Not bad. Pretty strong contender. And if we look, the photographer has a table there's there's the TV and there seems to be some sort of seats over underneath the TV there.

But then there's also this seating in between our table and the TV and its table underneath it. So I think we're on the far side with our back right against the wall. So maybe over here on this side. There's the 2 chairs and the table. There's the 2 chairs and the table.

And then our TV. Make sense? Cool. And it goes all the colors under the sun. There's the pink.

Oh it does, ooh those are nice. So, Halo Lounge. How do we move forward to maybe get some sort of confirmation. Let's zoom in on it and have a look at the area. So drag Street View onto here And here we go.

So there is Halo Lounge. And these shutters cover glass. That's what shutters generally do. Entryways into buildings are covered by glass. Sorry, covered by shutters, so the doors here on the left and the right.

And then I guess these are all just window bays, not sliding door bays, sliding window bays. And if we spin around, we can see Grove Cafe and we get to see this wonky 20 miles per hour sign. And if we go back here and we just zoom in do you see this? This little bit here? You've got if I just move myself again just there, outside Does that look like a wonky 20 miles an hour sign to you?

Because it does to me. It's at an angle and it's got this curvature on it, what are the chances that that is that sign? Pretty strong I think, pretty strong. So I think that could be where we're at. So there you have it, those are the exact steps that I took to figure out where that image was taken in under an hour.

Now my buddy had to go there physically and confirm that is actually the right location and it is the right location. Case closed. But as you can see it was a pretty manual process to get there. Sometimes you gotta get some search results and then just go through them manually which can be time consuming but that's the nature of the OSINT game. So keep practicing, I'll see you next time

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Solving a REAL investigation using OSINT