5 Reasons Why Security Leaders Need To Act Now To Protect Their Organization From Narrative Attacks

Today’s security landscape includes new complex threats, such as social engineering, narrative attacks, deepfakes, and coordinated attacks that combine narrative elements with real or perceived security incidents. Even a rumored breach compromises trust in a brand’s security and impacts every facet of the organization. These narrative attacks can happen fast. Harmful narratives and false stories can start with a single post and spread far and wide in minutes, blind-siding your organization and causing substantial financial, reputational, operational, and regulatory risk.

The World Economic Forum named narrative attacks as the #1 Global threat in 2024, and AI tools in the hands of threat actors make the problem only worse through deepfakes, real or fake cyber attacks, executive targeting, crisis events, market manipulation, geopolitical risk, and brand cancellation campaigns. Traditional cyber threat intelligence (Recorded Future) and social listening tools are inadequate for detecting and analyzing fast-moving narrative attacks’ full scope and impact.

The increasing sophistication of narrative-based threats and scrutiny by regulators underscores the urgency for security leaders to enhance their capabilities in detecting, analyzing, and responding to narrative attacks. By adding narrative intelligence to your security posture, security, and risk leaders can elevate their position at the executive and board level by providing real data to help their organization make better strategic decisions to reduce risk, especially during times of crisis. 

LEARN MORE: What is a narrative attack?

Security and risk leaders should ask themselves, am I aware of:

• The most harmful narratives impacting my organization?
• The contagion effect of the narrative across networks?
• Hyper-agenda-driven threat actors, cohorts, and communities behind the narratives?
• Bot-driven manipulation that scales them?

Your organization is at substantial risk if the answer is ‘No’ to any of these questions.

5 Reasons Why You Need To Act Now To Protect Your Organization From Narrative Attacks:

1. IT’S A NEW THREAT VECTOR THAT SECURITY TEAMS ARE UNPREPARED FOR: Narrative attacks are a blind spot. Threat Intelligence and social listening tools fall short in assessing narrative attacks as they require you to manually investigate individual posts (not narratives) and don’t look across social media, news and the dark web in 25+ native languages that include text, images/memes, videos (including audio tracks). It’s now easier than ever for threat actors to target your organization as they have access to new AI-based tools to create and scale harmful narratives, produce deepfakes, and exacerbate cyber incidents. Narrative Intelligence is a new category of cyber protection needed by every organization to help combat this new cyber threat. 

SEE: Ed Amoroso’s (former CISO of AT&T) take on How Narrative Attacks Represent a New Threat Vector 

2. MONITOR FOR WHAT NARRATIVES ARE ACTIVELY TARGETING YOUR ORGANIZATION/INDUSTRY: Be the first to know what harmful narratives are impacting your organization/industry as they start to flow across networks from social media, dark web, fringe websites, and traditional news outlets. Automated monitoring for coordinated narrative attacks is essential for getting ahead of threats and seeing narratives as they scale and become harmful. 

SEE: Joanna Burkey (Former CISO at HP) view on Narrative Attacks are Impacting The Technology Industry

3. GAIN INSIGHT INTO WHO’S TARGETING YOUR ORGANIZATION: Gain context and clarity around harmful narrative attacks impacting your organization. Understand who is targeting your company, what hyper-agenda-driven threat actors, cohorts, and communities are connecting and propagating them, and how automation, like bots, is accelerating their reach.

SEE: Iassen Christov’s (TAG Cyber Analyst) research on Narrative Attacks on National Security and Government Leaders

4. MOVE FASTER: Early warning and automated narrative intelligence monitoring enable organizations to react quickly to harmful narratives to minimize damage rather than reacting after threats have spiraled out of control. Most organizations do this manually today by trying to investigate and connect individual posts. This leads to major mistakes and could be more efficient. By automating this process through an AI-driven Narrative Intelligence Platform, your organization can move faster and more efficiently with confidence, especially during times of crisis. 

SEE: John Rasmussen’s (former healthcare CISO) perspective on Narrative Attacks in the Healthcare Industry

5. TAKE ACTION TO REDUCE BUSINESS, SECURITY, AND COMPLIANCE RISK: By gaining access to accurate data and insights at the speed behind narrative attacks, your organization can reduce risk. You decide whether to create a counter-narrative, communicate to customers, vendors, or regulators (SEC), or adjust your security posture to become more cyber-resilient and prepared for the future. Distinguishing these nuances before and during a narrative attack will help inform a strategy to reduce financial, reputational, operational, and regulatory risks.

SEE: Ed Amoroso’s (former CISO of AT&T) summary on How Narrative Attacks are Impacting the Financial Services Industry

The best defense against narrative attacks is a great offense; this is where a narrative intelligence partner comes in, like Blackbird.AI. Our AI-based Narrative Intelligence Platform enables you to automatically detect, analyze, and measure risk and gain context around the impact of emerging narratives to provide clarity for critical decision-making. By doing so, security and risk leaders can answer ‘Yes’ to the following crucial questions we asked at the beginning of this post. 

Security and risk leaders who adopt a Narrative Intelligence strategy with Blackbird.AI can now say, I am now aware of:

• The most harmful narratives impacting my organization
• The contagion effect of the narrative across networks
• Bot-driven manipulation that scales them
• Hyper-agenda-driven threat actors, cohorts, and communities behind the narratives
• An impactful strategy to make better strategic decisions, especially during a crisis.

To learn more about how Blackbird.AI can help you with election integrity, book a demo.