The Bellingcat Open Source Challenge.

At the end of 2024, Bellingcat released a set of online challenges that we hoped would test the skills of our audience and the wider open source investigator community. Bellingcat wanted the challenges to be educational, to encourage people to carry out responsible online research and, most importantly, to be fun! Around 35,000 people took part, far more than we expected. Some produced blogs about how they attacked the challenges, while GeoGuessr expert Rainbolt posted a video where he tried to solve five challenges in under 30 minutes. Bellingcat has now decided to make these challenges a regular thing – a monthly thing, to be precise. On March 3, 2025 Bellingcat launched the first set, which you can find here. They are also introducing a monthly Bellingcat Challenge newsletter that will announce when new challenges are launched, provide detailed answers to the previous month’s questions and highlight the most creative and cool ways that people came to their conclusions. Each monthly challenge will consist of five open source research questions, all centred around a single theme. The first question will be published on the first Monday of every month, with a new challenge released each day that week. So, by the end of the first week of every month, you should have five open source challenges to keep you busy. The challenges will, among other things, test your geolocation, chronolocation, shiptracking, satellite imagery analysis, image verification and flight tracking skills. Bellingcat Open Source Challenge wants to include as many open source research techniques as possible. Anyone is encouraged taking part to join our Discord server, where staff and members of the community will be sharing useful tips and techniques in the #BellingcatChallenge channel. On March 12, at 17:00 CET, there will be a live broadcast on the Bellingcat Patreon channel where Bellingcat founder, Eliot Higgins will go through the challenges.

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The Bellingcat Open Source Challenge is Back