Disinformation security, as a cybersecurity use case, focuses on protecting an organization from the malicious spread of false or misleading information that can damage its reputation, disrupt operations, or compromise its security. This goes beyond traditional cyberattacks by targeting the cognitive and informational domain, often leveraging sophisticated psychological manipulation and digital channels to achieve harmful objectives.
The detailed aspects of Disinformation Security as a use case include:
Proactive Identification of Vulnerabilities: Before disinformation about an organization can spread, adversaries often seek to compromise or imitate its legitimate digital assets. This involves securing public-facing infrastructure.
Detection of Malicious Narratives: Continuously monitoring online platforms (social media, news, forums, dark web) for the emergence and spread of false information related to the organization, its products, executives, or operations.
Authentication of Digital Content: Ensuring that official communications, documents, and multimedia (images, videos, audio) are genuinely from the organization and have not been manipulated or deepfaked.
Brand and Reputation Defense: Counteracting brand impersonation, fake product reviews, fabricated legal claims, or misleading financial news.
Fraud Prevention: Mitigating phishing, vishing, or smishing attacks that use convincing, AI-generated disinformation to trick employees or customers.
Operational Resilience: Preventing disinformation from causing panic, inciting physical harm, disrupting supply chains, or undermining public trust in critical services.
Executive & Employee Protection: Safeguarding high-profile individuals from deepfake impersonations or targeted online harassment campaigns.
How ThreatNG Helps with Disinformation Security
ThreatNG, focusing on External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection (DRP), is uniquely positioned to be a powerful tool in a Disinformation Security effort. It provides the crucial "outside-in" perspective to identify and mitigate threats that leverage public-facing assets and online narratives.
Here's how ThreatNG's specific capabilities contribute:
External Discovery
ThreatNG's External Discovery is the foundational step, helping organizations understand their true digital footprint, including assets they might not even be aware of. This is critical for disinformation security because attackers often exploit these unknown or forgotten assets.
How it helps: By continuously mapping all internet-facing assets, ThreatNG identifies potential attack vectors that could be used to host or spread disinformation.
Example: ThreatNG might discover an old, unmonitored subdomain (e.g.,
archive.yourcompany.com) that was used years ago for a temporary project. A disinformation actor could compromise this forgotten subdomain, inject fake news articles that appear to originate from your company, and use it to spread false information without immediate detection. ThreatNG's discovery would flag this asset, allowing you to secure or decommission it before it's weaponized.
External Assessment
ThreatNG's External Assessment capabilities go beyond simple discovery, providing in-depth analysis of identified assets for vulnerabilities and exposures that could be used in disinformation campaigns.
How it helps: It evaluates the susceptibility of external assets to various attack types, including those that underpin disinformation.
Examples in great detail:
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG identifies vulnerable subdomains an attacker could take over.
Scenario: A company has a subdomain
blog.yourcompany.comwith a dangling DNS record. An attacker could register the abandoned domain that the record points to, then useblog.yourcompany.comto publish fabricated press releases or politically charged articles, making them appear official and impacting your company's stance or reputation. ThreatNG identifies this vulnerability, allowing the company to reconfigure or remove the DNS record.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses the security posture of web applications.
Scenario: Your customer support portal,
support.yourcompany.com, has a known vulnerability like a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaw that ThreatNG detects. An attacker could exploit this to inject malicious scripts that alter content on the page, showing fake announcements about product recalls or service outages, leading to customer panic and reduced trust. ThreatNG highlights this, enabling remediation.
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG discovers and assesses mobile applications related to the organization.
Scenario: ThreatNG discovers a rogue mobile app impersonating your banking app using a similar icon and name. This app could collect user credentials and then display fake balance information or fabricated transaction histories to deceive users into thinking their money is safe while it's being stolen or push out fake alerts about bank closures. ThreatNG would identify this deceptive app early.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: ThreatNG evaluates an organization's susceptibility to business email compromise and phishing.
Scenario: ThreatNG might identify that your organization's email domain lacks robust DMARC policies. This makes it easier for threat actors to spoof your company's email address and send highly believable phishing emails crafted with generative AI. These emails could contain disinformation, like fake layoff announcements or urgent requests for funds to a fraudulent account, using the appearance of legitimacy to trick recipients.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses factors that could lead to brand damage.
Scenario: ThreatNG discovers a trend of negative sentiment or specific keywords related to your brand appearing on obscure forums or dark web channels, alongside discussions of "cancel culture" tactics. This indicates your brand is being targeted for a potential online smear campaign using disinformation, allowing you to prepare a proactive communications strategy.
Data Leak Susceptibility: ThreatNG identifies exposed sensitive information.
Scenario: ThreatNG identifies a misconfigured cloud storage bucket (
s3.yourcompany.com/customerdata) containing old customer records, even if not a direct data breach. An attacker could access this data to craft highly personalized and convincing phishing attempts that contain false information, like a fabricated "security alert" about a service change that directs users to a malicious site. The exposed data makes the disinformation highly credible.
Reporting
ThreatNG provides comprehensive and actionable Reporting on discovered risks and exposures.
How it helps: Clear reporting allows security teams and non-technical stakeholders (aligned with ThreatNG's "Security Centric; Not Security Exclusive" mantra) to understand the specific disinformation threats and the necessary remediation actions.
Example: A report highlights all domains related to
yourcompany.comthat are registered by suspicious entities and have weak security configurations. This allows the legal and brand teams to initiate takedown procedures for potential cybersquatting used for disinformation, while the IT team strengthens DNS security.
Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG offers Continuous Monitoring of the external digital presence.
How it helps: Disinformation campaigns are dynamic; new threats emerge constantly. Continuous monitoring ensures that it's detected as soon as a new piece of infrastructure that could support disinformation appears (e.g., a new lookalike domain, a deepfake of an executive).
Example: After a major company announcement, ThreatNG continuously monitors social media for newly created accounts or domains that closely mimic the company's official presence. When a fake "official" account starts posting fabricated quotes from the CEO regarding a controversial policy, ThreatNG's continuous monitoring flags it immediately, enabling swift action to report and remove the imposter account.
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG's Investigation Modules allow deeper insights into identified threats, providing context and actionable intelligence.
How it helps: These modules provide the detailed evidence and analysis needed to understand the nature of a disinformation threat, its origins, and potential impact.
Examples in great detail:
Domain Intelligence: Beyond just listing domains, this module investigates the entire domain ecosystem around an organization.
Scenario: An alert comes in about a new domain,
yourcompany-news.info. The Domain Intelligence module reveals that this domain is registered anonymously, hosted in a high-risk country, and has DNS records pointing to a known malware distribution server. This immediately flags it as highly suspicious, likely created to spread disinformation or malware under your brand's guise, allowing for proactive blocking and takedown efforts.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module scans public code repositories and mobile apps for exposed sensitive information.
Scenario: The module discovers an old, publicly accessible GitHub repository from a former developer that contains API keys and configuration files for a critical internal system. Although not directly disinformation, this exposure gives an attacker the necessary leverage to breach systems and inject disinformation directly onto your official platforms, making it appear authentic and causing significant internal or external damage.
Dark Web Reconnaissance and Monitoring: ThreatNG monitors the dark web explicitly for threats.
Scenario: This module identifies discussions on a dark web forum among threat actors planning a "short-and-distort" attack against your company. They discuss creating fake financial reports and disseminating them through compromised social media accounts to drive down your stock price. ThreatNG's detection allows your financial and security teams to prepare for this type of disinformation attack, potentially by issuing preemptive statements or working with exchanges.
Intelligence Repositories
ThreatNG is "driven by continuously updated intelligence repositories" from the dark web, vulnerabilities, ransomware, and more.
How it helps: These repositories provide the context and threat intelligence necessary to identify emerging disinformation tactics, known bad actors, and malicious behavior patterns. This allows ThreatNG to enrich its findings and provide more accurate and actionable insights.
Example: When ThreatNG detects a new website imitating your company, its intelligence repositories might cross-reference the site's hosting IP or registrar with a known list of infrastructure used by a state-sponsored disinformation group, immediately elevating the threat level and informing the response strategy.
ThreatNG with Complementary Solutions
While ThreatNG provides comprehensive external visibility and risk protection, it can work synergistically with other cybersecurity solutions to form an even more robust disinformation security posture.
ThreatNG with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms:
Synergy: ThreatNG's continuous monitoring and investigation modules generate alerts and actionable insights regarding disinformation threats (e.g., the discovery of a deepfake, or the identification of a brand impersonation). A SOAR platform can ingest these alerts and automate the initial response actions.
Example: ThreatNG identifies a fraudulent social media account impersonating your CEO and posting false company news. This alert is fed into the SOAR platform, which automatically initiates a workflow: it reports the fake account to the social media platform, drafts an internal alert for the communications team, and creates a high-priority ticket for further human review.
ThreatNG with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems:
Synergy: ThreatNG provides external threat intelligence and context about disinformation campaigns, which can be correlated with internal security event logs from a SIEM system.
Example: ThreatNG detects a sophisticated phishing campaign targeting your employees, using AI-generated content and impersonating a legitimate vendor. The SIEM system, receiving logs from email gateways and endpoint detection solutions, can correlate this external intelligence with internal events like failed logins or suspicious email attachments, providing a clearer picture of who was targeted, if any compromise occurred, and the overall success of the phishing attempt.
ThreatNG with Internal Content Management Systems (CMS) & Digital Asset Management (DAM):
Synergy: While ThreatNG protects the external perception, securing internal CMS and DAM systems prevents internal assets from being compromised and used to create disinformation.
Example: ThreatNG identifies an increase in deepfake generation capabilities sold on the dark web that specifically target corporate executives. Simultaneously, your internal CMS system could be hardened with stricter access controls and audit logging based on this intelligence, ensuring that only authorized personnel can upload or modify official company statements or multimedia, thus preventing the injection of deepfakes from within.
By integrating ThreatNG's powerful external visibility and risk assessment capabilities with complementary solutions, organizations can build a multi-layered defense against the complex and evolving threat of disinformation.
