One day in our Discord server, my friend Drago threw me an OSINT challenge
“Try doing OSINT on this image.It’s not a CTF or anything serious — just something I found on a random webcam through Shodan.It’ll be good practice. I only need the country and village name,” Drago said.
The image
Curious, I took up the challenge. The image he shared didn’t have any obvious clues at first glance, but I was determined to figure it out. Here’s how I cracked it.
The Clues I Found
- Source on Shodan: Since Drago said the image came from Shodan, I figured that reverse image searching might help, but unfortunately, the image’s metadata didn’t give me anything useful either.
- Looking for Clues in the Image: The first thing I focused on were the cars in the driveway. I noticed two cars in the driveway:
- Nissan Micra
- Mercedes-Benz C-Class Estate
Both cars are popular in Europe, which helped me narrow down the region a bit.
- License Plate Details: Looking closer at the orange car’s license plate, I noticed it had a flag with blue, white, and red stripes. That left me with two main suspects: France or the Netherlands.
- Shodan to the Rescue: Knowing that Shodan tends to have more webcam images from the Netherlands than France, I focused my search there. I used this query:
has_screenshot:1 -screenshot.label:blank country:“NL” Server:1
Image ratio of Netherlands and France in shodan
Boom! I got around 300 results. I sifted through them patiently, scrolling through one by one…
- The Final Find: And finally, I found it. The image came from a webcam located in Waarde, a small village in the Netherlands. Mission accomplished!
image on shodan
And that’s how I solved Drago’s OSINT challenge. Thanks for reading!