I know.. I know.. No one cares, no one asks, but still I’ve decided to write them, just to have a place to self reflect.

Affirmation bias

You can’t even imagine how many times I’ve been there… You think, that you have found the “smoking gun” or next pivot point, but nah… I would say if you are limited in tools, you will be less prone to affirmation bias, then when you have 1001 tool. You would ask why, you can cross validate and that’s it.

In my opinion there are limitations to cross validation especially if 90% of time, you work with edge cases not typical -> enumeration -> data leaks enrichment -> enumeration -> infostealers intelligence enrichment -> enumeration and validating pivot points. That’s not so difficult, I would say issue starts when you have partial phone numbers and you somehow always find person who theoretically ticks all the boxes (profile, forums, activities *at least more or less*).

What I’ve have started doing differently?

I would say using ranking them by likely hood and still leaving them in, just if I can’t get same results via at least 3 pivot points I label it low certainty (if the links are weak-medium).