fathom sail
Following the creation of Bellingcat in 2014, the first few years were focused on publishing investigations, and running training sessions.
In December 2017, Christiaan Triebert hosted a workshop as a representative of Bellingcat. The image above shows Christiaan at that event.
Your task is to identify the name of the room seen in the photo (answer format: The Name Of The Room).
Image credit: ARIJ Network
This is my first post, so excuse me if I haven't followed any guidelines correctly. This one was straight forward enough, but the biggest pain was having the answer early on, but the incorrect spelling.
||Simply searching the workshop host and the image source led to a schedule with the floor and room as the first result. This didn't turn out to be the correct room though, but they did have a list of rooms I could try, however the spelling was incorrect. This I had to find on the actual event venues website.||
hollow glen
||The resort's website has photos of the event rooms. The carpet is thematic in the resort, but only one photo has the green paneled walls.||
zinc otter
This is my first post, so excuse me if I haven't followed any guidelines correct...
geolocation challenges have to be approved by the mod team, you find them here @ornate narwhal and than will be posted on #1077154436167761960
nice idea btw
thin pebble
geolocation challenges have to be approved by the mod team, you find them here <...
Posting the challenges on challenge.bellingat.com in this channel is fine! Thanks for posting @fathom sail!
granite elm
As I overlooked, the photo credential, I used ||advance twitter search|| to find tweets connecting the host to the conference and went from there.
covert helm
so what's the answer?
covert helm
This is my first post, so excuse me if I haven't followed any guidelines correct...
what would the website be?
fathom sail
what would the website be?
||look at the image credit on the challenge page||
covert helm
yeah i know
that was the first thing I noticed
do I have to look on that website?
cause I did, and I found the schedule and stuff
hollow glen
Assuming you're looking at the schedule for 2017, there's been a couple ways folks have honed in on the result. I ||clicked on the "Floor G" link and that took me to Australia, which wasn't helpful. So I went to the hotel's website and looked for photos to match the room in the photo. That got me the right answer on first attempt.|| It looks like Gambit ||was foiled by the schedule showing the wrong room; I suspect that, in the moment, it was moved to a different room due to demand. The schedule website does list the correct answer, but not the canonical name for the room from the hotel.||
covert helm
ah ok, but I find it kind of hard to look for the ||photo on the hotel website||
hollow glen
The photo from the challenge won't be on the website, rather, ||you're trying to see if any of the pictures show a room with similar features to what's in the photo.||
hollow glen
||Sometimes it helps to browse a website as if you were someone other than a researcher. Rather than looking for a photo, imagine yourself as the conference organizer and you're trying to pick the right place for your meetings. That can help narrow down which areas of the website you're browsing.||
covert helm
ah that makes sense, I'll try it
cause there was an option for that
do I have to click on ||"request for proposal"|| here?
hollow glen
||That does not appear to be the website for the host of the conference in 2017||
covert helm
||it's the hotel website||
hollow glen
||You're looking for a resort that hosted the December 2017 conference where Bellingcat ran a workshop, hosted by Christiaan. The website you provided appears to be for the hotel that hosted the conference in 2019.||
covert helm
ow
alright
didn't know that
I'm pretty lost, how can I find the correct website?
hollow glen
You've got ||a name of the conference host||, ||the year||, and ||you want to see the schedule so you can verify it has a Bellingcat-led workshop.||
covert helm
it's this website, right? ||https://arij10thannualforum2017.sched.com/event/Cf6S/investigating-war-and-conflict-with-digital-information-hosted-by-bellingcat-br-hosted-by-bellingcat-tqswy-wqy-hrwb-wmntq-nz-blmlwmt-lrqmy||
hollow glen
||Yes, that's the right thread. Now you just need to tug on it to see what's on the other end.||
covert helm
nice phrasing
so I need to continue from there
||clearly you can find the following name of the room: Al Diwan 1||, but I don't know what the next step is
hollow glen
Ah, something just dawned on me. First, have you been to https://challenge.bellingcat.com/ ?
And if so, have you solved the "Fresh Faced" challenge?
covert helm
no
I gave up on that
too difficult for me
probably because I have almost no experience
hollow glen
Ah, fair, and it looks like Training Time is unlocked now. But, yes, once you have an idea which room it is, enter that into the answer box to check your answer.
hollow glen
There's hints about why it didn't work in the spoilered text above.
covert helm
yeah I looked at it, ||but it mentions the website I found||
and I don't how to go on from there
hollow glen
Now that you're on the right schedule page, this is what I'd advise again:
#1368978772518375544 message
covert helm
ok, but I still don't know how to find the website
hollow glen
If you're looking for the hotel's website, ||The name of the hotel is shown on the schedule. There's also a link to a map that has a screen snip from Google Maps. Precise searching is important, as you might find more than one result if you only search for part of the name.||
covert helm
I can't see ||the name of the hotel, unless it's written in Arabic||
hollow glen
||To be fair, the hotel doesn't have the word "hotel" in its name. It's got a couple fancier names to make it sound more expensive.||
hollow glen
||Also the hotel chain is more common in EMEA.||
covert helm
||so the whole business behind the hotel is mövenpick, correct?||
alright
I'm on the right track (with some help)
is ||myvenuefinder-accor.com|| the right website?
hollow glen
That wasn't the one I was looking at, though ||Accor is the parent company for Mövenpick|| so it's still possibly the right place to be. Companies can sometimes have the same content hosted on different URLs depending on how you find the site. I could go into more detail on that, but that's probably something better for #infosec.
covert helm
||so you used the official website of the specific hotel?||
hollow glen
||It looks like I did, yes. I found it from Googling, but it also appears to be the one cited in the Google Maps entry.||
covert helm
alright I FINALLY found it
took me a while lol
||the next challenge looks like it requires some IT skills||
covert helm
I just solved "Fresh Faced"
||I gotta admit, I looked at the post and learned that the language was Croatian. Without that hint, I would've never found it.||
mighty citrus
32: Training Time (Back in Time)
stiff dragon
Interesting challenge. As I'd quickly found the event itself with Christian speaking. That bit was easy. || The clue was ARIJ Network so searched for this - limiting the dates on Google. Then went to the ARIJ site and found that 2017 conference not linked, but each conference took a URL format so substituted 2017 to get the conference. Then found Christian's talk BUT the room named wasn't correct. So had a quick look here - and somebody suggested looking for the hotel. I knew that from the website - so searched meeting rooms at the hotel and only one matched the picture ||
covert helm
Nice work