PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, influence operations, and online harms.
"If I had a nickel for every time an Autonomy billionaire sued by HP has died in a mysterious circumstance in the last week, I’d have two nickels which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice…" says one Tweeter trying to make a somewhat insensitive joke tweet about a recent tragedy, “OR IS IT” chimes in @GaryQCh3mTra1ls911 who is tweeting from a porch in the middle of the Nevada desert, wearing a tinfoil hat, looking up at the plane flying overhead thinking that the thin white streak coming out the back of it is capturing the minds of innocent citizens to be controlled by the World Economic Forum.
People love a good pattern - this isn’t anything new. “Good things come in three”, “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”, and “the early bird catches the worm” – these old wives’ tales are all rooted in the identification of a pattern in life. The psychology behind it is simple – our brains take in so much constant information that to make sense of it all, it (the neocortex, more specifically) will find and recognise patterns to process data as efficiently as possible. It comes from natural selection and the human brain has one of the best abilities to identify and decipher patterns in the world; in many cases even better than computers – it's why the best intelligence comes from people sitting at desks not an AI program running off a supercomputer in some underground bunker. Take the Enigma code for example – sure it was the Bombe machine that cracked it, but it was Turing’s brain that spotted the flaw in a code which led to the breakthrough.
Conspiracy theories are effectively just naff patterns taken to the extreme. In the grand scheme of pattern identification two mysterious deaths doth not equal HP-hitman, but by golly does it make a tweet. There are quite a few different types of conspiracy out there but most of them have the same core roots – patterns and Satan. Let's take the example of the Travis Scott Astroworld crush in 2021 where 10 people died and 25 were hospitalised after the crowd surged to the stage when Scott began performing. It was a disaster, caused by a mix of poor event planning and ineffective security and both have been held to account. However, the pattern recognition conspiracy theorists continue to believe that Astroworld was a ritual Satanic sacrifice. There were tweets about how the date and posters were covered in Satanic numbers, about how the stage was an inverted cross, and about how the number of victims correlates with some kind of ancient ritual. People even made facts up, claiming that Scott and his co-performer Drake were born 66 months and 6 days apart—666—the devil.
Patterns aren’t always correct, sometimes it’s people lying for likes, sometimes it’s a dude in a tinfoil hat taking math to the extreme to fit his conspiracy theory, and sometimes it really is just a coincidence. There was a gorgeous red sunset last night but this morning it was absolutely throwing it down – no shepherd’s delight. I left the house to get to the office earlier than I did yesterday but arrived later because I got hit with more traffic – no early worm… Travis Scott is not a Satanic worshiper, the stage design was not an inverted cross, it’s one of the most popular designs among performers as it allows them to walk out into the crowd…. And Hewlett-Packard are not sending hitmen out against the billionaires they are locked in legal battles with.
Subscribe to the Digital Threat Digest
More about Protection Group International's Digital Investigations
Our Digital Investigations Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.
Disclaimer: Protection Group International does not endorse any of the linked content.
Good things come in threes, unless you’re Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, enjoying successive coups in 2021, 2022, and 2023 respectively.
While my experience of parenting has been limited to trying to ‘school’ my younger siblings (classic older child behaviour), I have recently started thinking about how we should explain digital threats to children and the next generation – i.
PGI, in collaboration with project management partner Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI), recently completed a study under the USAID and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) initiative aimed at promoting gender equity and inclusion in cybersecurity across Asia and the Pacific.