Sofia Santos OSINT Exercise #022

Walkthrough by @Oculus969

5 min readDec 21, 2023

Hello! I’m Oculus969 — it’s my first article here, I hope you’ll enjoy it 😉

Task briefing:
The two images below come from a security camera overseeing a port. They were taken almost nine years apart. Both have a vehicle highlighted.
Your task is to:
a) Find the link to the camera’s live feed.
b) Geolocate the security camera.
c) Find the license plate of the vehicle highlighted in blue.
d) Find the licence plate of the vehicle highlighted in orange.
Exercise level:
For beginners: a) Medium, b) Medium, c) Hard, d) Hard
For experts: a) Easy, b) Easy, c) Medium, d) Medium

So, let’s find out first the webcam and where it is located.

The first shot was to google “Yamoto Fishing Port” (in the upper left corner of the photo).

Not good, only one and what’s worse irrelevant entry. Maybe just Yamoto will show something here. This time I found some useful info — this will lead me later to solution to task b.)

Anyway, what about the link to the camera? I spent some time ⌛searching for sites with webcams for Japan and Higashimatsushima in particular but with no success.🤯 Definitely I must have missed sth here. Let’s use the best OSINT tool, i.e. brain 😉

I decided to come back to searching with “Yamoto fishing port” but this time for Images only. And voila!

Then I copied mx10–20–227–180 into Google and entered the below page

I was almost there, it was just one step from the solution.

Deleting unnecessary ending of the URL I got http://202.239.224.34/ — the correct answer to task a.) 😁

Now it was time for some geolocation, I chose to play a bit with Google Earth Pro. As I mentioned before Yamoto is now a part of Higashimatsushima. What I need was to find some kind of harbour nearby with the characteristic objects marked in red below.

The encircled area looked quite promising

Then at a closer look I spotted the characteristic white building and some kind of breakwaters like in our photos.

In Street View mode I was quite sure I’m at correct place — the vehicle and the building in front of me

Then I looked right and I was really happy — the characteristic image on the building proved I was at the correct place ! Also I found a post nearby with the webcam I was looking for 🎥 Task b.) solved with exact coordinates, yeah!

Now it was time for task c.) I walked around to see the spot where the vehicle was in 2015. And there it was, just the same vehicle as in the second photo.

The vehicle’s plates were of course blurred by Google (it would be too easy then) but there was something potentially useful on its side written in Japanese. With Google Image I found the name of the company owning this vehicle and its web page.

There were some pictures of 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, in 2015 after some time of searching I came across the below photo:

The answer for task c.) is 56–36

With task d.) I found a solution yet I’m only 97% convinced it’s really correct (well, 100% sure basing on existing data but still…)

To be able to find some photo of company’s another vehicle I went to the their Facebook profile and in Photos tab I found the below photo in a post of 23 May 2016.

There is still a remote possibility they’ve bought recently another identical car but for the sake of this exercise I’ll try not to be an overthinker 🤪

The answer to task d.) is then 31–20.