Attribution
The phase in which responsibility is assigned to some entity for an information manipulation campaign.
After some content has matched all criteria in the Qualification phase, investigation and forensics can be used to attribute responsibility.
Attribution is a difficult business, as false hints can be left for impersonation purposes, misleading the public into reacting to the wrong entity. For example, one could buy artificial followers to inflate the audience of a target without its assent or even knowledge, in order to get the target accused of artificially boosting a message.
Most of the practices in this phase relate to the fields of OSINT (Open-Source INTelligence) and forensics analysis.
