A walkthrough to Sofia Santos' OSINT Exercise #001

Introduction

This post is a walkthrough for OSINT Exercise #001 by Sofia Santos. I’ll be sharing my approach, thought process, and the steps I took to solve this exercise. If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, feel free to visit her website here

The Challenge

In this exercise, the goal was to pinpoint the exact location and identify the coordinates based on a single image shared in a tweet. Using OSINT techniques and visual clues from the image, the task was to determine the precise spot where the photo was taken.

Below is the image used for the challenge:

Solution

As someone who plays GeoGuessr a lot, my immediate reaction when I saw the picture was, “This looks like Senegal“. Something about the landscape, buildings, and environment felt familiar. But as I looked closer, some elements didn’t quite fit:

1. The Poles and Road Markings: These didn’t look like the usual ones found in Senegal.
2. Language in the Tweet: The tweet was translated from Arabic, which ruled Senegal out since it’s primarily a French-speaking country.

Now, the picture clearly had the city name 'Kiffa' mentioned, so a simple Google search would have led me there quickly. However, since I initially had a 'Senegal vibe', I started to scan bordering countries and eventually found Kiffa in Mauritania relatively quickly.

This was probably the easy part—you can just Google the city name and get there (and yes, there's only one 'Kiffa' in the world). The real challenge, however, was to pinpoint the exact location shown in the image, which proved to be a bit more difficult.

Since Mauritania does not have official Street View coverage, I switched from Google Maps to Google Earth to try and pinpoint the location. I spent about 10-15 minutes scanning different parts of the city, trying to match something with the image, but nothing seemed to line up. Then I realised something that made the challenge a lot easier—the distinct lack of infrastructure in the direction we were facing likely meant that we were leaving the city rather than being within it.

This left me with just a couple of roads that were theoretically possible, making it much easier to scan. As I went through them, I noticed that most of the roads were barren and dry, but one stood out—it had trees growing along the sides. This detail was crucial because we can see trees in our image. With just one road left to check, I used Google Earth’s historical imagery feature and set the year to 2013 (the same year the tweet was posted). From there, I carefully lined up the scene using the buildings and the tree behind the buildings opposite us in the picture.

Coordinates (Roughly) : [16°36'33.56"N 11°23'52.03"W]

This challenge is labeled as medium/hard, and I think that’s a fair assessment. You can identify the city relatively quickly, but pinpointing the exact location requires a bit more patience and careful analysis. For me, it took around 25-30 minutes to complete, which I believe is a reasonable time frame for an exercise of this difficulty.