Find everything about this NewsPaper Image!

Welcome to OSINT exercise #008!

Task briefing:
The large photo below was taken from a page of the Epoch Times, a Chinese newspaper.

Please answer the following questions:
a) What was the audience applauding?
b) When was the photo taken?
c) What is the name of the venue?

Image:

Looking at the newspaper overall, I was able to spot something on the top right of the newspaper, which could be crucial for our search: The date.

Note: I also noticed the URL in the top left. I will maybe come back to it if I get stuck.

I can tell that the “2023” is obviously the year. I am confused about the other 2 values now. I will just check out the normal format commonly used in China for dates.

We can see the same format here in Chinese, which is: yyyy-mm-dd.

Now, we know that this is a newspaper from Epoch Times (a Chinese newspaper) published on 12th January 2024.

With all that, I searched about the Chinese newspaper and used Tools to specify the time range to be around 12th Jan:

I obtained these searches but unfortunately, they didn’t work:

I even tried going through the images, but absolutely nothing matched!

As a last resort, I tried searching the URL that I had previously taken note of and I FOUND THIS:

On going to the link:

With just the headlines, we can definitely answer the first question:

a) What was the audience applauding? It was Shen Yun.

Now let’s recap the questions:
b) When was the photo taken?
c) What is the name of the venue?

If I manage to find this particular image on the website, I should be able to answer both of these questions at once.

With this screenshot, we can finally conclude the search:

b) When was the photo taken? January 7
c) What is the name of the venue? The Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, Virginia

This OSINT challenge might have looked tough but by simply knowing how to google, I managed to solve this challenge. Just try out a few OSINT challenges and I’m sure this will be a breeze for you if it isn’t already!

Tip to take from this challenge: Try to find as much information as you can before actually starting the challenge. With the URL information which I casually took note of, I managed to solve the challenge when I got stuck.

Hope you had fun watching me solve this OSINT Challenge!