OSINT Walkthrough: Bellingcat #2

“Intelligence is the ability to see patterns, connect dots, and extract meaning from complexity." - Maria Konnikova

Here I am back with another interesting OSINT challenge! I loved the feedback I received, and I'm here to learn more, share my insights, and learn from everyone as well.

Here’s the link to the challenge we’re going to solve: https://challenge.bellingcat.com/

Let’s open the challenge to understand what it’s asking us to solve.

We closely examine the image, and based on our observations, we notice a carpet, a green-colored section on the walls, a door, a whiteboard, and a few other elements.

Here are the key details mentioned as clues in the description:

• The event took place in December 2017.

• It was hosted by Christiaan Triebert, who also appears in the image.

• Image credit: ARIJ Network.

To investigate further, I’ll use the following Google Dork:
"Christiaan Triebert" "2017" "ARIJ"

Opening the above-highlighted link, it appears to match all the details we mentioned in the dork.

Although the year mentioned above is 2019, when we hover over the event schedule, we can confirm that it is actually 2017, as shown in the image below.

Since we are trying to identify the room where this event took place, we need to find out which resort it was held at.

We click on the Maps option to locate the hotel. We've identified it as 'Mövenpick Resort & Spa Dead Sea.' Since this is an image, we'll use Google Maps to search for the hotel.

Now it's time to look for the rooms. We'll need to compare them against the main image that was shared with us as a clue.

We’ll go through all the available photos on Google Maps and also the resort’s official website, as shown below, to ensure we don’t miss any images that might provide clues about the room.

We go through the rooms and all available options one by one.

We click on “Find out more” to explore additional rooms.

As we scroll down, we notice a room that shares notable similarities with the one in the clue, such as the carpet and the green wall, which didn’t appear in the other rooms.

Let’s try submitting the name of the room into the challenge solution input field.

And we have successfully solved the challenge!

I hope this walkthrough was useful. Let’s keep learning together and solve more challenges, they’re a great way to upgrade our skills.

Thank you to Sofia Santos and the Bellingcat team for creating such wonderful challenges.

I’ll be back soon with more walkthroughs :)