OSINT Challenge: Where is Baptiste?

Yesterday as per usual the (in)famous Baptiste Robert or @fs0c131y on Twitter was on the road. As he likes to do on such occasion he challenged his followers to show off their OSINT skills by finding his flight number merely using the picture below (Figure 1).

Figure 1 [1]: the OSINT challenge

Seeing this as an opportunity to prove to my boss that he was right to hire me, I decided to take him up on this challenge. My name is Alice, I am an analyst at Predicta Lab and today I will explain how I found Baptiste Robert’s flight number.

Usually my first step when starting from an image would be to check the meta data. Unfortunately for me the meta data of a picture is erased when it is uploaded to social media thus I will not be able to find any here.

Instead I turn to the information around the tweet: we can see it was posted on November 29 at 20:39. The time corresponds to the time displayed by the clock on the picture minus 2 minutes. This indicates that the picture was taken right before the tweet was posted and it looks like it was taken in an airport. We can then assume the time corresponds either to the arrival or the departure of the flight we are looking for.

The picture is blurry so my first instinct would be to think that Baptiste is late and running to catch his plane. But Baptiste is never late, everyone else is simply early. And we can see the sign “Sortie” or “Exit” in the picture which is more commonly placed on a way out of an airport than on the way in, so he is arriving. Moreover, because the sign is written in French and I know that Baptiste is French, this is likely located in an airport in France. Thus I will follow the lead of plane arrivals in France around 20:30 on Monday 29th November.

France has about 102 airports so instead of going through all of them I would start by looking at the busiest ones such as Paris Charles de Gaulle or Paris Orly. However a quick google search tells me that Baptiste is from Toulouse, the best city in the world according to experts. We can find this information in an article by La Dépêche presenting him [2]. Hence Baptiste likely arrived at the Toulouse Blagnac Airport. Moreover, a comparison of our reference to a picture from the website of that airport [3] shows a similar pattern in the white bars against the windows and the same yellow roof. Admittedly these similarities are not enough to prove with certainty that we have the right airport but being from Toulouse, I can recognize that the hallway we are looking for is indeed in the Toulouse Blagnac Airport.

Figure 2: On the right, the picture of reference. On the left, check-in desks in the Toulouse Blagnac Airport [4].

Thus I start by checking yesterday’s flight schedule of arrivals in the Toulouse Blagnac Airport on Flightradar24[5]. In Figure 3 you can see the list of planned arrivals from 20:20, including all planes that arrived until the time when the picture was taken, 20:37.

Figure 3 : Arrivals in Toulouse Blagnac Airport on November 29, 2021

With only four possible solutions left, I am getting close to the answer. The flight from Bristol landed at the exact time that the picture was taken in the hallway so unless Baptiste is gifted with the ability to teleport (which I am not aware of), this is not the flight we are looking for.

The flight from Rennes can also be discarded: it landed at 20:05 and the Toulouse airport is rather small so it is unlikely that one would take more than 30 minutes to get to the hallway leading to the exit. Likewise the Easyjet flight from Paris landed at 20:12 and 25 minutes seems like a long time to cross this airport, especially on the way out.

Hence my answer to the challenge is the following: Baptiste arrived at the Toulouse Blagnac Airport at 20:30 on Monday 29th November in the flight number AF6144 from Paris.

After consulting Baptiste I found out that this is the correct answer and he agrees that I keep my job. Phew !

[1] Baptiste Robert. (November 29, 2021). #OSINT quiz: What is my flight number?. Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1465405030224306178

[2] Gardent Bianco-Levrin, M. (June 1, 2021). Baptiste Robert, un hacker Toulousain qui vous veut du bien. LaDepeche.fr. Retrieved from https://www.ladepeche.fr/2021/05/31/baptiste-robert-un-hacker-toulousain-qui-vous-veut-du-bien-9577499.php

[3] Aéroport Toulouse-Blagnac. (2021) Fiche d’identité Société Aéroport Toulouse-Blagnac. Aéroport Toulouse-Blagnac. Retrieved from https://www.toulouse.aeroport.fr/societe/fiche-identite

[4] Aéroport Toulouse-Blagnac. (2021) Fiche d’identité Société Aéroport Toulouse-Blagnac. Aéroport Toulouse-Blagnac. Retrieved from https://www.toulouse.aeroport.fr/societe/fiche-identite

[5] Flightradar24. (2021). Toulouse Blagnac Airport. Flightradar24 Live Air Traffic. Retrieved from https://www.flightradar24.com/data/airports/tls/arrivals