OSINT pivot counts: what 4,100 investigations actually used

A data release: 4,100 anonymized OSINT investigation traces with pivot-count distributions by case type.

OSCI Editorial

Collaboratively written by mentors and contributors.

How many pivots does a real OSINT investigation take? Public guidance varies wildly — from “two or three” to “as many as it takes.” We can do better.

We are releasing 4,100 anonymized investigation traces, contributed by mentees with explicit consent, with pivot-count distributions broken out by case type (account takeover, phishing campaign, vendor-fraud, etc).

Methodology

Investigation traces collected via opt-in submission from OSCI mentees during 2025–2026. All personally-identifying selectors removed via the published scrubbing pipeline. Dataset: github.com/daddy-development/OSCI-data-osint-pivots-2026.