Looking Back: An Overview of Pakistan’s first OSINT Championship

We received more than two dozen applications from individuals of Pakistani origin to compete in OSINT Championship-2022. After necessary due diligence, 17 players were approved.

The game play was structured as follows: A common Challenge Sheet was emailed privately to competitors, each containing a set of 5 riddles worth 5 points each. Thus, over a span of 4 weeks (one month), competitors had the chance to earn a high score against 100 marks in total.

Each riddle’s cumulative score of 5 was further broken down as such:-
• A correct answer carried 2 points.
• A brief explanation of how the competitor found the answer carried another 2 points.
• Link/ URL to the correct answer (for mod verification) carried 1 point.

Thus, competitors not only had to submit their answers but also explain and substantiate them with evidence. In this way, we were able to evaluate their technical as well as cognitive capabilities. Competitors who failed to submit responses to weekly challenge sheets by the given deadline were disqualified from proceeding further; mere retention of a high score was not a guarantee for continuity.

Here’s the weekly breakdown of fierce participation:
• Seventeen participants in Week 1.
• Nine participants in Week 2.
• Eight participants in Week 3.
• Six participants in Week 4.

I take this opportunity to appreciate all competitors who battled against challenges till the end. You can see their final cumulative scores here.

In particular, I would like to acknowledge and appreciate the enthusiasm displayed by Shibl Gill alias marzipan, our only Pakistani competitor based overseas (Hafrsfjord, Norway) coming in second place. Humayun Hayat Khan alias Eureka from Shorkot secured third place.

While Fahad Nabeel alias Maverick from Islamabad was leading from Week 2 onward, Shibl had put up a tough fight and secured first place near the end of the final round (Week 4). Fahad submitted his answers on time and aced the round to become overall winner and subsequently, our OSINT Champion.

While the contents of our weekly challenge sheets remain strictly confidential, we can share some generic highlights to give you an idea of the sort of challenges posed:
• Week 1: Pinpointing the nationality of a state leader through identification of an infected C2 server, finding out who performed at a party in America’s West Coast on a particular timeframe, identifying an associated social media account from a primary target using leads.
• Week 2: Acquiring details of certain individual and state-led social media accounts through social media intelligence on Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.
• Week 3: Profiling of a foreign public figure using vague clues linked to another individual, examination of a historical figure using geographic coordinates linked to a public figure in the present day.
• Week 4: Geolocating and reverse-probing certain images of places and objects that were slightly distorted to extract very specific information.

All in all, it was a virtual event that garnered active participation and enthusiasm from all competitors. As the convener of the Championship, I wish all participants the best for their future endeavours.

Pantellica (Pvt) Ltd hopes to sustain this venture into an annual event to identify, celebrate and award OSINT practitioners of Pakistani origin.