OSINT Case Study #01: Pivots and Mountains
A quick note: After writing professional, formal reports, I wanted to create a series of case studies that are a bit more casual and show the realer and humorous side of me. This is the first of that series. Enjoy!
1. The Challenge: An Accidental OSINT Problem
The other night, after an exhaustive and soul-crushing search for jobs, I did what any sane person would do: I retreated to the comforting abyss of Reddit for some classic doom-scrolling. My one goal was to completely unplug my brain from anything remotely related to OSINT. And then, of course, I came across an interesting photo. My first thought wasn’t “Oh, that’s an interesting view.” It was, “I bet I can find exactly where that was taken.” It seems there’s no rest for the wicked (and unemployed).
After getting the green light from the original poster to use their photo for this digital treasure hunt, the objective was set: use the art of open-source intelligence to pinpoint the exact patch of earth the photographer was standing on.
2. Initial Analysis: From a Continent to a Country
First things first: narrow the search area from “Planet Earth” to a specific country. The photo was in a Philippines-related subreddit, but that’s about as reliable as a weather forecast, so I needed more.
- Environmental Clues: The presence of a large rice field adjacent to a highway immediately brought Southeast Asia to mind.
- Infrastructure & Local Details: The specific design of the electric poles matched those commonly found in the Philippines. Furthermore, zooming in on the small flags by the roadside revealed the text “Crop Giant.” A quick Google search confirmed Crop Giant is a prominent agricultural brand in the Philippines.
- Commercial Branding: The most obvious clue was the large Petron gas station sign. While Petron has a presence in Malaysia, it is ubiquitous in the Philippines.
With these data points combined, I’m quite sure, it’s Philippines. High confidence. Now I “only” had to search a country of 7,641 islands.
3. The Pivot: Working Smarter, Not Harder
At this point, I had a solid country and a checklist of ground-level features: a straight highway, an adjacent rice field, an arc-shaped waiting shed, and a concrete side-road.
Now, I could have opened Google Maps, typed in “Petron Philippines,” and prepared to lose the next three weeks of my life virtually visiting every single one to see if it’s close to the right kind of shed. But fortunately, I’m not paid by the hour for these passion projects, and that sounds mind-numbingly boring. A more strategic approach was needed.
Instead of trying to solve the puzzle with just the pieces in the photo, it was time to find the “box top”, the context surrounding the image. I decided to do a little Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) and check out the Reddit user’s profile, hoping for a clue to their home province or city. See, I’m not a one-trick pony.
But this led to a new problem: the user’s post and comment history was completely hidden. A digital dead end.
Or was it? The profile still held one tantalizing clue: the banner image. It depicted another beautiful rice field, but this time with a massive mountain range looming in the background. As the great Benjamin Strick once said , “Mountains are gifts.” This banner just became my new favorite lead.
4. The Breakthrough: Mountains, and a Little Trickery
I had two ways to crack this.
Path A: The Obvious Route (Reverse Image Search)
I fed the banner image to the reverse image search gods. The top results immediately screamed Mount Banahaw, a famous volcano located on the border of the Laguna and Quezon provinces. Better yet, another matching image were specifically tagged with Victoria, Laguna. Given how identical the thumbnails are in the results page with the one in the banner, this gave me a powerful, high-probability lead.
Path B: The “Ace in the Sleeve” (The Digital Archive)
Just for fun, and to be absolutely sure, I decided to negate the user’s hidden history. I used a tool called Reddit Archive (ihsoyct.github.io). This handy little bookmark can often retrieve a user’s post and comment history, even if it’s hidden and deleted. Sure enough, supplying the username confirmed a mention of Laguna and even gave me an uncropped version of the banner. The search area was now definitively confirmed.
5. Geolocation: The “Easy Way”
With the search narrowed to Victoria, Laguna, it was time for a little top-down reconnaissance.
- Filter: A quick search for “Petron” within Victoria, Laguna, returned only a handful of candidates.
- Analyze: I cross-referenced each one against my ground-feature checklist. Only one was sitting next to a massive rice field on a dead-straight highway.
- Verify: Zooming in on this candidate via satellite imagery, everything clicked into place: the concrete side-road, the waiting shed, even the specific stripe patterns on the asphalt.
- Ground-Truth: Finally, I dropped a pin in Google Street View. And there it was. The arc-shaped shed, the road junction, the Santan plant from the photo… everything. Bingo.
6. Verification: The “Hard Way,” Just to Show Off
Just for funsies, I pretended the Petron Logo wasn’t visible as one of the clues and went with the mountains alone.
- Enhance: I tweaked the banner photo’s brightness and contrast to get a clean silhouette of the mountain range: a tall peak, a valley, a smaller peak. A topographical fingerprint.
- Orient: In Google Earth Pro with 3D terrain enabled, I flew to Victoria, Laguna, and started rotating the camera. After a bit of fiddling, the 3D rendering of Mountains matched the silhouette from the photo perfectly. I had my line of sight.
- Triangulate: With the angle locked, I just flew the camera forward. The highway appeared. The rice fields rendered. And like magic, the Petron station and the shed materialized right where they were supposed to be.
7. Conclusion & Key Takeaways
The photograph was taken at approximately coordinates 14.193003, 121.338797, in Victoria, Laguna, Philippines.
So, what did we learn, besides the fact that my brain never truly clocks out?
- Pivoting is Everything: When one path (brute-forcing ground clues) looks like a nightmare, find another. The user’s profile, though seemingly empty, held the key.
- Mountains Don’t Lie: They are unique, permanent landmarks. If you can see a mountain, you can likely find your spot.
- Expand Your Tools: Sometimes the solution isn’t on Google. Knowing about niche tools like Reddit archives can turn a dead end into a smoking gun.
