Sounds of freedom!
Description: In a recent raid on a suspected COViD hideout, we found this video in a thumbdrive on-site. We are not sure what this video signifies but we suspect COViD’s henchmen might be surveying a potential target site for a biological bomb. We believe that the attack may happen soon. We need your help to identify the water body in this video! This will be a starting point for us to do an area sweep of the vicinity!
Firstly, we used exiftool to check whether the video contained any useful metadata that might reveal the GPS information. There wasn’t any. Next we obtained the video frames using ffmpeg, making sure the video frame rate (30) was correct:
$ exiftool osint-challenge-7.mp4
...
Video Frame Rate : 30
...$ ffmpeg -i osint-challenge-7.mp4 -r 30.0 FRAME%4d.jpg
The water body in the video looked like this:
There was also a bus stop along the road:
We landed ourselves in hot water by making 2 wild guesses wrongly, namely:
- MacRitchie Reservoir
- Forgotten…
One dollar 3 tries and we were left with 1.
Back to the drawing board, we watched the video multiple times and turned on the speaker’s volume. Now we noticed a new clue: the sound of a fighter jet taking flight!?
So we pondered: what are the air bases in Singapore?
- Tengah Air Base
- Sembawang Air Base
- Paya Lebar Air Base
- Changi Air Base
What water bodies are near air bases?
- Tengah River
- Lower and Upper Seletar Reservoir
- Bedok Reservoir
- Punggol Park
However, the area to search for was still quite large. What other details in the video had we overlooked?
- On the right hand side of the video, there were air-con units installed on those 3 floors that were shown
- On the left hand side of the video, there were ZipTrak/ZipScreen installed
Based on the above 2 observations, buildings that have these characteristics were likely to be people’s homes!
So we reduced our shortlist to those where there were civilization: Bedok Reservoir and Punggol Park.
Among those 2, Punggol Park stood out because of the upcoming Punggol Digital District and it was related to Technology.
Now we combed Google Map Street View and got these:
We captured the flag! *cry tears of joy*
