A walkthrough to Sofia Santos' OSINT Exercise #002

Introduction

This post is a walkthrough for OSINT Exercise #001 by Sofia Santos. I’ll be sharing my approach, thought process, and the steps I took to solve this exercise. If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, feel free to visit her website here

The Challenge

In this exercise, the goal was to find the name of the train station and the tallest building that could be seen from the given image.

Below is the image used for the challenge:

Solution

Alright, this exercise was a bit to the easier side, we didn't have to pinpoint or find exact coordinates. The first task was to find the name of the train station and this was relatively straight-forward; we can see 'Flinders Street' written in the image so a quick search on Google Maps does the job. The name of the train station is indeed 'Flinders Street Railway Station' in Melbourne, Australia.

Now we had to figure out the tallest building that is seen in the picture. Just from a quick glance you can kinda tell it is going to be between the tower like building (the left most one), the IBM building or the dark blue ish building which we can see behind the IBM building.

So all we need to do is identify the names of the buildings and confirm their heights using Google. Just dropping by the tower on Google Maps, I figured out that it was the 'Arts Centre' building and checking its height on Google, it shows up as 162m. Similarly, checking the IBM Australia building, it shows up as 131m. Now we just need to know the name of the last building to come to our final answer.

Since I knew that the last building was behind the IBM building, I looked at Google Maps and there was basically only 1 main road behind it, so I just looked for a building that matched the building on the image.

I found the building 'Focus Apartments' which looked like the one we were looking for. Then, checking its height, it came up to be 166/167m making it the tallest building we can see in the picture.

This exercise was pretty easy I'd say, took me around 10 minutes to solve this. Compared to the first one, this was much faster since there was no pinpointing.