How to identify people in photos? A practical approach to OSINT

15 July 2024 2 minutes Author: Cyber Witcher

The article is devoted to the review of methods and tools for identification of persons in photographs using open sources. It will cover the most popular and effective tools such as reverse image search engines, social media databases and specialized image analysis software.

Task instructions

The photo below shows four people. The task is to identify them all.

First, Google Lens was used to find articles that used these photos.

Using Google Lens
News article

It was established that the photo depicts the Libyan political agreement that took place in Morocco on December 17, 2015. In addition, other photos from this event were found in the article. (photo1, photo2, photo3).

Photos

Next, a search was conducted using the keywords “Libyan political agreement” on the website of the Vertical website.

gettyimages

More images have been collected from Vertical. In order not to overload the article with images, links to the images used (photo 4, photo 5, photo 6) are provided. A period of around December 17, 2015 was specified for this search.

A search was then conducted for official documents related to the Libyan Political Agreement that emerged from the civil war that followed the 2011 Arab Spring. This issue led to the establishment of the Government of National Accord (GNA). A Google search for “Libyan Political Agreement” yielded two documents from the time. The last page of the PDF in Arabic contains the names of the signatories.

To sign

The letters were extracted using Google Lens and some names were searched.

Salih Hama Bakda
Mustafa Abushagur
Mohamed Moazeb
Fadil Muhammad Al-Amin

After that, it remained only to compare the found names with different photos. It is important to be careful when converting names, as Google Lens OCR can contain errors.

Answer:

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