Sofia's OSINT Exercise 002

💡 Check out Sofia's amazing blog and this exercise here

Challenge

“The photo below was shared on social media. It clearly depicts a train station. Please answer the following questions:

a) What is the name of the train station seen in the photo?
b) What is the name and height of the tallest structure seen in the photo?”

First Look

Things that stand out:

• we see train station name signs
• a skyline of building

The name signs on the train station should be more than enough to locate this photo, so let’s get started.

Flinders Street

Sofia was nice enough to include a big version of the source photo and we’ll happily use it. Zooming in, we can easily identify what the train station signs read: “Flinders Street”. A quick search on Google Maps takes us to Flinders Street Station, Melbourne, Australia. We confirm the location by finding the distinct train station sign and three of the buildings on Street View and task a) is complete.

Skyline

In our source photo the IBM tower (reddish-brown building on the right) appears to be the tallest, but if we use Google Earth to line them all up, the white spire to the left looks like it’s taller. We don’t count the red-and-white cranes on the rightmost building, since they’re not part of the building, not on Sofia’s original photo, and as such not part of the challenge. More about those cranes in the section Final Remarks.

While investigating this I found out that you can actually use Google Earth Pro to get an approximated elevation by simply hovering your mouse pointer over the structure in question. The bottom right corner will show the current height above sea level - pretty neat to make quick comparisons or estimates.

Using this feature we quickly compare the height of the three top candidates and learn that they are approximately 156 (white spire), 132 (IBM tower), and 132 (glass skyscraper) meters tall, respectively.

Perspective, Perspective, Perspective 👀

At this point I was almost convinced that the white spire, which is part of the Arts Center Melbourne building, and according to Wikipedia 162 meter tall, is our winner. Just to make sure I decided to verify this further, because after all this is what intelligence analysis is about. And I’m very glad I did, because it turns out another building takes the cake.

I first checked osmbuildings.org, which is a great resource for dense urban places if you need to get an overview of buildings and associated statistics like height or material, and don’t want to be overwhelmed by Google Maps. It provides accurate height data for two of our three top contenders. The Arts Center Melbourne including the spire measures 162m and the IBM tower measures 131m. However, at the time of writing it seemed to be missing the glass skyscraper on the far right with the red band on the roof.

Using a combination of Google Earth and Google Maps, we can find out that this building is called Focus Apartments by the property development company Central Equity. According to the website skyscrapercenter.com the building was completed in 2023, but Multiplex, the main building contractor lists it as late 2022. Skyscapercenter lists its height at 166m, whereas Multiplex reports 167m. Either way, it’s taller than the spire of the Arts Center Melbourne, and is the final answer to question B! Crazy how perspective can influence our bias…

Final Remarks

At some point in this investigation I got very confused by the red-and-white cranes because I couldn’t believe the Focus Apartments building was taller than the Arts Center’s spire. Google Earth’s elevation suggested that the spire was taller and it just looked so obvious. This led me to believe that the cranes must be some sort of structural feature of the building itself, counting towards its height. That would make sense, right? Nope, not right.

I quickly debunked that theory after I found pictures of the finished building that didn’t include these mysterious spires. I confirmed this further by finding Google Street View footage of the building during construction, that clearly showed the cranes in different positions.

Lessons learned:

• Historical Street View and Google Earth data can help judge timelines
• Google Earth’s elevation tool is useful for a quick estimation, but can’t be trusted for accurate measurements
• Always verify your findings and don’t trust the naked eye

Tools used

• Google Maps
• Google Street View
• Google Earth Pro
• OSMBuildings.org
• Skyscrapercenter.com