Day one

OSINT has always been an interesting topic to me. Before I even know that cybersecurity was a viable path for my career I was already pretty good at OSINT. Admittedly, back then it would be searching up the usernames of other players on CS:GO and trying to find any information to give my team the upper hand (Might not have been the best way to use the information, but I’ve moved on from that life now).

OSINT is a very useful tool in investigations. There are plenty of stories of darknet marketplace administrators being arrested for having horrible OPSEC and being caught, in part due to investigatioons using OSINT.

I recently stumbled upon OSINT4Fun and their Advent of OSINT challenges. I’m going to set this as a goal for myself to try and make a post for every day leading up to the 25th. Let’s see how well I can do!

Question one

Who was driving this car in this picture? Add alt-text

I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about Formula-1, or racing in general. The only thing I really know is that this is a photo from an F1 event, or one of the other minor leagues… I hope.

First things first, I’ll pop the image into [images.google.com] and see what we get. If this doesn’t get us anything useful then we can take a closer look at the brand logos visible on the side of the car, but for now we’ll see what comes up! Add alt-text This is the first time that I’ve had much use with the Google AI’s search results. I didn’t know that Formula 1 had a Fandom site, but it makes sense. Thankfully this gives us the answer of the driver being Fernando Alonso.

Question two

That year, on which circuit did Alonso achieve his best result?

From the previous search it appears that this image was taken during the 2001 Formula One World Championship. I’m going to take this as the truth for now. Looking at Wikipedia there’s a nice table showing each driver and their standing on every race: Add alt-text We can see that Fernando Alonso achieved his best result of 10th place on the German track, which is called the Hockenheimring.

Question three

A few years later, on this same circuit, he took his revenge by winning the race. What was his average speed (in km/h) during that race?

We first need to figure out which race the question is about. To do that, I found this site which had stats for each driver on the Hockenheim course. We can see that Alonso managed to get 1st place for the first time in 2005.

Now we know the year of the race, we need to figure out the average speed. I decided to keep it simple and simply searched ‘fernando alfonso 2005 average speed hockenheim’ into Google.

I then came across this article, which had this little paragraph:

Alonso covered the 67 laps on the 5,574km Hockenheim circuit in one hour, 26 minutes and 28,599 seconds, for an average speed of 212,629kph. Montoya was 22,5 seconds behind and Button 24,4 seconds adrift.

Shoutout to that random South African website keeping this article online for 20 years. It definitely helped!

That’s all for today! I’ve not participated in the Advent of OSINT before, so here’s hoping I’ll be able to keep it up every day! Stay tuned to find out!