Gralhix OSINT exercise 005 walkthrough
This is a walkthrough of the OSINT exercise 005 by Gralhix.
Starting off this OSINT challenge I did a reverse image search which led to nothing, unsurprisingly, since the image is taken from a livestream.
Assuming there are not many zoos which livestream their polar bear enclosure I just googled “polar bear live cam”, with San Diego Zoo being the top hit:
Comparing the structure of the background architecture led me to believe this is the correct zoo:
So question a) could already be answered: San Diego Zoo
I now completely forgot about question b) and tried to find the coordinates of the screenshot.
While looking at their website I found out they’re located at “Northern Frontier”: https://zoo.sandiegozoo.org/animals/polar-bear))
While using Google Maps I started searching for the Northern Frontier at San Diego Zoo, which is located in the western part:
Because we know the exact date and time the screenshot was taken I then used Google Earth Pro, which has the great ability of viewing historical data. There was a snapshot from December 2022:
But this gave me no real clue.
(In hindsight the dark color of the soil would have been a great indicator for the coordinates, but I did not focus on that)
I then found out there’s street view data of the enclosure:
I somehow focussed a lot on the northern part of the enclosure and tried to compare these hideouts …
But you can clearly see the stones are different. Walking around in Google Street view strangely did not lead me to the solution.
For a change I wanted to find out if there’s historical livestream data or any videos, which lead me to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ZN9rdYSDU
Skipping forward to the polar bear part, at 5:33 I knew that’s it!
To find out where this was taken I used the background architecture and the small “cliff” as reference points. Rewinding the video a few seconds gives a great view of the background.
This gives us the answer to question c): coordinates are 32.734460, -117.154583
Remembering there’s a third question, which was about the temperature when the screenshot was taken led me to google again:
Knowing the screenshot was taken at around 2pm local time gives us a temperature of 63 °F:
