Pivot Fields and How they Change the Way You Investigate
Introducing A New Concept to OSINT and Info Gathering
Everyone needs OSINT, but everyone doesn’t know what OSINT is.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the science of collecting, analyzing, and sharing publicly available data.
Sources of OSINT include news, images, videos, internet, social media, websites, and the dark web (an encrypted pseudo-anonymous network not available to common internet users).
Everyone needs information in order to take sensible action:
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In the mean time, while the consumer market is still waiting to catch all the away on to the power of OSINT government, law enforcement, private investigators, law firms, military, and corporations are utilizing OSINT.
When you start learning OSINT professionally you will run into the use of 2 terms: identifiers, selectors.
Identifiers - is a unit of information used to recognize an entity. (John Doe)
Selectors - is a unit of information that is targeted by our analyst or investigator.
Here is where if we want to keep up with our new AI enhance investigative tools we may want to modify the old OSINT methodology. Identifiers and selectors are great for task oriented searches, but everyone that collects OSINT data needs to be aware of the story it tells. For that we need a term that helps us identify data with close relationships to our selectors. That term is ‘pivot fields’. With LLM enhanced tooling making use of distance measuring algorithms (how computers relate selectors and identifiers) taking advantage of pivot fields gives our investigations connections and defines relationships that reveals the story behind the data.
Pivot field - is unit of information that is used to correlate, enrich, or reveal other bits of data regarding an entity.
Pivot fields are the digital breadcrumbs of data that reveal the story behind the data. John Doe is your identifier, john.doe@gmail.com is your selector, the Facebook profile that is attached to the email may also be a selector. The picture of your target at a club combined with the media publications about their involvement would be a pivot field.
The reason pivot fields are necessary is regardless of how technical your investigation connections serve to humanize the data. For example this is an IMEI number : 352812197869128. Without context this is meaningless, but if I tell you that Eugene Henley Jr(Big U) of the Rollin 60s Crips was hit with a federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charge and a major piece of the evidence used was cell phone location data, the IMEI can gain greater meaning. This means that at some point during the investigation the IMEI number tied the Eugene Henley Jr’s cell phone pinged a cell tower and reported longitude and latitude data correlated to locations of interest to law enforcement. Ironically Big U can be seen on video podcasts and Youtube discussing all of the surveillance cameras and cell phone cameras means that you can’t get away with crime like you use to, but it would seem it was the portion of OSINT regarding geolocation data that was his downfall. Most of the instructors that I learned these skills from were in fact Feds willing and able to teach anyone who was interested, but for some reasons a lot of people are just afraid to enter those rooms. So when rhetoric around this case is tossed around in reference to snitching (the act of abusing the honor system while living under the principle of trust amongst thieves) and no one bothered to adapt to technology I think the snitching is irrelevant. Simply put it doesn’t matter if someone told if the time and location of a murder is correlated to the IMEI number of device owned by you.
Maybe you’re not interested in Hip Hop culture’s tie in with pivot fields. So what if we looked at this from the prospective of protecting a young woman who is dating for the first time?
My advice is to use a secured snapchat account, textnow number, or a secure dating profile (one where you don’t use your real name 😉, no but seriously people can be weird), but NEVER GIVE OUT YOUR REAL NUMBER TO AN ONLINE DATE. **Also Carry Knife On All Dates, and Deploy In Case Misunderstanding Regarding Consent**
The point is your real phone number can be used you to tie you to your home, relatives, location, and more.
At this point I’d assume you’re interested in one of two things:
Either you are familiar with OSINT or you just want to take a crack at this yourself. I’d recommend checking out OSINT Dojo for techniques and just at the bottom of the blog you will find a list of pivot fields by industry/subject.
If you’re the person wanting to learn more about OSINT/pivot fields, but you want a mini-course with a live instructor that won’t cost the same as mortgage in Dubai; I know a guy. Click the link below.