Geolocating Social Links’ Co-Founder via OSINT techniques
How did I locate him through a picture taken in the elevator?
Hey Folks!
In today’s blog, we will dive into an OSINT investigation I’ve conducted to identify the exact geolocation of Ivan Shkvarun - the Co-Founder of Social Links company, as a part of an OSINT challenge he gave.
First of all, I started my investigation by downloading the picture to look for some more details inside.
As we can see, the picture is mirrored due to the mirror in front of Ivan, so I flipped horizontally (left to right) using pinetools.com a great tools website.
Now let’s try and get some clues from the picture.
I zoomed in the picture via imgupscaler.media.io. First, I looked at the signs in the elevator, and the atmosphere inside.
At first glance the elevator looks very fancy (might be a hotel or a business center), with a white marble floor and a wall, a building with many floors (47), LIFT 5B 10th floor.
Background signs are written in Arabic and English and we can see that the name of the elevator company is “Comfort” (top left). The logo is a circle (not full- kind of a C letter) with two arrows inside, one pointing up and one down.
I’ve searched “Comfort Elevators” on Google and found a potential match.
Comfort Elevators is a Fuji company agent in the Middle East and the company is located in Doha.
Back to the elevator, there is a black sign that might give information about the floor plan (Lobby, Reception, Pool, Spa, etc...)
We can see that the logo is rounded (black and white).
I looked into the Clients page on their website to try and identify the logo inside the elevator and found a potential match from all the clients listed.
The logo is “Pullman Hotels & Resorts”.
So I navigated to Pullman’s official website to find potential locations with Arabic language — Middle East.
There were 3 potential countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.
I’ve tried to search on Google to try and find a high building with 45+ floors.
Found one that is located in Doha, Qatar.
The name of this hotel is “Pullman Doha West Bay”.
A great website to check for tell buildings around the world — ctbuh.org.
In addition to that, I found a Wikipedia List of the tallest buildings in
Doha, Qatar, so I tried to look for this specific 45–50 floor hotel inside the list.
I found the Pullman Hotel inside!
Now I decided to look for pictures from visitors of this hotel, A great solution is Google and TripAdvisor.
Just to remind you, we are looking for a similar picture of the elevator with all the indicators and signs inside (marble, black sign with Pullman logo).
I’m using Google Dorking to specify my search.
BINGO! found the same pattern! (It’s another elevator inside the hotel — a smaller one).
The exact location is: Pullman Doha West Bay, Al Shatt St, Doha, Qatar , 10th Floor
In conclusion, the task was not simple at all.
Because part of the picture was blurry I had to guess some of the writing. But in the end, I was able to get the clues that led me to the result.
Remember, everything depends on your creativity and thinking outside the box.
Happy hunting investigators! See you next time.
