How the Blackbird.AI Platform Addresses Narrative Attacks in the Insurance Industry

The insurance industry provides a safety net for individuals, businesses, and communities by helping to mitigate risk. This role places insurance companies, brokers, and other stakeholders at risk of cyber threats, and strong security schemes have been put in place by enterprise security teams working in this industry. However, a new challenge has emerged in protecting insurance industry participants’ reputations and financial results. 

In particular, narrative attacks on insurance involve an adversary using either misinformation, which is factually incorrect data, or disinformation, which is using bad data to target an individual or group deliberately. When this type of bad information is used against an insurance company or broker on social media or other public means, reputational and financial challenges occur, which can damage an organization.

Learn More: Narrative Attacks: The New Cybersecurity Threat

Narrative Attacks on the Insurance Industry

The most dangerous types of narrative attacks focused on insurance companies or brokers would be those designed to undermine the basic fabric of the industry – namely, the provision of trust and financial security for customers. These goals are the main reasons for buying insurance, whether property, casualty, health, life, or other forms of insurance. Narrative attacks can undermine such industry objectives.

Consider, for example, a false narrative describing an insurance company shedding some major business units or dismissing key staff. The idea that an insurance company would be laying off staff (assuming this is false) might give buyers pause regarding the firm’s financial stability. Present and future policyholders may reconsider their renewal or purchase options in the face of such bad information.

There might also be narrative attacks that provide misinformation on the mishandling of loss claims or sensitive personal information of some policyholders. This could involve false statements about mishandling some customer’s health information or diagnosis. The representation of events such as this, whether through misinformation or disinformation, can quickly gain social traction and severely impact the company’s reputation and financial position.

One could also imagine narrative attacks, perhaps on social media, of some customer losing a loved one and then hitting a bureaucratic wall when attempting to gain access to their life insurance policy proceeds. One can easily see how such misinformation could spread, like wildfire, across environments such as social media and the news. Such a narrative attack would disturb many readers and harm the targeted insurance company.

Learn More: Business Case: Why Cybersecurity Leaders and CISOs Need Narrative Risk Intelligence

Addressing Narrative Attacks with Blackbird.AI

As suggested above, false public or social narratives are too easily levied in today’s social climate. As with phishing, threat actors need only create narrative scenarios that compel people to be swayed – and readers already know how easy this has become on the Internet. The good news is that commercial Narrative Intelligence Platforms such as Blackbird.AI allow insurance companies to identify these harmful narratives and clarify the topic to manage the risk.

Blackbird.AI engages with insurance industry participants to carefully collect relevant data about their firm and use advanced monitoring to identify the narrative risk quickly to take action. Customers need not worry about expensive deployments or capital outlays as the offering operates as a Software as a Service (SaaS) capability and can be engaged quickly and efficiently.

Thus, insurance companies should consider engaging with security solution providers such as Blackbird.AI to implement a narrative attack risk reduction program. Without such protection, the types of attacks described above could easily occur. Insurance buyers are advised to contact Blackbird.AI to learn how their platform can reduce this risk through misinformation and disinformation protection.

To learn more about how Blackbird.AI can help you in these situations, book a demo.