Geo Location From Mr.Robot
Where’s Elliot?
Step 1: When an image is prompted before you without context, the initial step is to just “Google it”. This could be done in many ways: Googling with keywords, reverse searching images, using dorks to skim through the results. From this,I got to know that it’s New York.
Step 2: The next step is to identify the objects/props around. What all could be the potential props around this image?
Step 3: Always remember, OSINT is not a one way road, you can approach a target in many ways. Here one that caught my attention was the bridge.
Step 4: As I didn’t know any of the bridges in New York, again I just “Googled it”.
Step 5: By scrolling through, I found the following design similar.
Step 6: Here comes the camera angle. The next frame of this shot gave me a ‘potential clue’ and also confirmed that it was indeed The Manhattan Bridge.
Step 7: The real hunt is now. Remember the potential clue that I talked about? And again the follow the sigma rule, observe the objects around.
Step 8: The not so clear board said, “New Rosa’s Dry Clean & Laundry”. And I just put that on Google maps and tried to see if The Manhattan Bridge was nearby.
Step 9: Indeed, it was at a distance that I could zoom out. Here’s a tip, if you didn’t know already, you could measure the distance in Google Maps by right clicking and selecting measure distance.
Step 10: Now I zoomed in and walked along the Google Street View. To concise the result I looked around the timeline of 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 & 2018. Why? Because Mr.Robot was first aired on 24 June 2015. And I got the following views.
Step 11: Even with all this visual proofs I was not very convinced. As I was not getting the perfect camera angle. So I went on further and applied the sigma rule of identifying props. Apparently, Elliot was walking near the pointed arrow.
Step 12: Further more I walked through the street and got to the point where I started — New Rosa’s Dry Clean & Laundry.
Anyone could do OSINT, especially Geo location intelligence. Just fire up your browser and start locating! That’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed. You can follow me on Twitter.
