Finding Luther — An OSINT Geo location Challenge.
London is an amazing terrain to do GEOINT. Its intricate small roads in between the buildings made it more complex & beautiful. To my eyes, every building looked similar.
Step 1: This time I wanted to approach the target differently. So the first thing that I did was to reverse search the image. I got few results on Google & Yandex. Even they pointed out the season and episode number of Luther.
Step 2: Here’s a tip (if you didn’t know already), IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Fandom Wiki pages could be super useful when you are investigating movies or TV shows.
Step 3: So it would have been easy, right? Hmm, no. These locations are the major ones (trivia), they could be different cities, counties, divisions, tourist etc. And they don’t dwell into the details of the coordinates. Even in this case, the image was shot in a random spot.
Step 4: Time for the real hunt! All buildings looked similar, the majority of them were brownish (maroon) in color. So now I tried to look for the objects (buildings)
Step 5: From the arsenal, I used the “just Google it” trick once again. And I got quite few results, & eventually they proved to be false positives.
Step 6: When you are looking at the structures, especially curves & quadrilaterals, probably you can’t know how they look at different angles (unless you’ve some experience with design software programs). These were some false assumptions that I made.
Step 7: These buildings looked similar in some angles, but they were misleading. So, I started looking at the reverse searched images and some miracle happened. I got an image from a meme/troll forum. (Trolls are good when used right)
Step 8: The image doesn’t look special, ain’t? But for me, it told me something. That is, the unique building (The Shard) is near to the contoured bull nosed building (pardon for the jargon).
Step 9: And also a wild intuition, neglecting the timelines, supported my vision.
Step 10: From The Shard, I moved in a slightly slanted way to find this unique building. And finally I got the Moor House.
Step 11: And now came the blindness! Remember, I mentioned earlier that every building in London looked the same? Well, now I just tried to imagine the angle from the Moor and started looking for the building corners & edges.
Step 12: And finally I found it. Yay!! — https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5234999,-0.080207,117m/data=!3m1!1e3
Step 13: To note down few observations, Luther was standing in a bit elevated building, the props around serves as a supporting evidence.
Step 14: Just to confirm, I walked here & there to locate the adjacent buildings.
That’s all for now. Anyone can do OSINT. Spread the word. You can follow me on Twitter.
