How the Blackbird.AI Platform Addresses Narrative Attacks in the Healthcare Industry
By John Rasmussen Senior Analyst at TAG Infosphere and former healthcare CISO
To confront narrative attacks, healthcare cybersecurity strategies must evolve beyond traditional IT security to safeguard information integrity and institutional credibility.
The healthcare industry encompasses various commercial offerings, including hospital care, emergency services, and pharmaceutical products. These aspects of healthcare have always been attractive targets for malicious cyber actors, and the industry has had to develop good solutions for health-related cybersecurity. Today, these protections must be augmented with new controls designed to ensure the integrity of healthcare participants’ reputation, revenue, and intellectual property.
The type of narrative attacks aimed at a healthcare organization would typically involve misinformation, which is factually incorrect data, or narrative attacks, which would involve an adversary focused on degrading the reputation of a hospital, care facility, or other health-related organization in this sector. As one would expect, this could have serious reputational and financial consequences in how to dispense services to patients and customers.
Learn More: Narrative Attacks: The New Cybersecurity Threat
Narrative Attacks to Health Care Organizations.
Typical narrative attacks one might expect to see in the healthcare industry include inaccurate information regarding medical products (e.g., medications, medical devices, product recalls), false or misleading treatment information, audio deep fakes of earnings meetings for public companies, human resources hiring scams, or use of recycled information to directly attack the reputation of some targeted healthcare leaders or entities.
Narrative attacks can be motivated by angry patients, disgruntled employees, upset investors, cyber criminals, or malicious nation-states. Such motivation can range from minor dissatisfaction to a significant focus on theft. For example, a threat actor could spread narrative attacks on a social media channel about a late-phase clinical trial drug to delay its approval and get a competing drug to market first.
Politically motivated or hacktivist groups could also create fake or misleading information on different treatment methods, like vaccines, to create a narrative for a certain point of view or to just inject chaos into the population. As all readers will attest, areas of intense social debate, such as vaccines, are perfect breeding grounds for false narrative attacks to attract a wide audience of readers.
Learn More: Business Case: Why Cybersecurity Leaders and CISOs Need Narrative Risk Intelligence
Disgruntled patients, employees, or customers could also have personal reasons for spreading narrative attacks about healthcare. These are typically motivated by bad medical outcomes. A social media video reusing old video, combined with a script, could purport to display negligence and malpractice and be distributed widely. Hospitals targeted with such narrative attacks would have great trouble repairing their reputation.
Whatever the motivation for a narrative attack, every healthcare provider, supplier, manufacturer, or researcher must keep up with false information that could spread quickly without a counternarrative and ultimately impact quality patient care or public health. Blackbird.AI, using its Constellation Narrative Intelligence Platform, can help spot or detect narrative attacks against organizations in the healthcare sector.
By exposing emerging risks or existing misinformation, the Blackbird.AI platform can provide healthcare organizations with the information needed to make informed strategic decisions to stop the spread or to create a counter-narrative. By leaving narrative attacks unaddressed, the healthcare industry can be overwhelmed with misinformation that could impact revenue, intellectual property, and reputation.
To learn more about how Blackbird.AI can help you with election integrity, book a demo.