Narrative Risk Gap
The Narrative Risk Gap in cybersecurity refers to the critical disconnect between an organization's actual, technical cyber risk posture and the perception, or "narrative," of that risk by key stakeholders, particularly senior leadership (e.g., the Board of Directors, C-suite), employees, the public, and investors.
Components of the Narrative Risk Gap
This gap is a sophisticated concept that extends beyond traditional technical vulnerabilities. It primarily involves two major components:
Technical vs. Executive Understanding:
Technical Reality: This is the objective, quantifiable truth about the organization's security posture, including detailed vulnerabilities, threat intelligence, security control performance metrics, and the quantified financial impact of plausible cyber scenarios. This is the internal security team's perspective.
Executive Narrative: This is the simplified, often qualitative story being told to the board or C-suite. Suppose this narrative is overly technical, jargon-filled, or focuses on fear-mongering without a clear business context. In that case, leadership may fail to grasp the actual financial and operational impact of the risks. Conversely, if the narrative is too reassuring, it can lead to complacency and under-investment.
Internal vs. External Perception (Reputational Risk):
Internal Perception: The narrative among employees that shapes the security culture. If the internal narrative downplays risks or fails to explain why security policies matter, employees may disregard protocols, leading to insider threats or human error gaps.
External Perception: This is the public and investor narrative. This gap is exploited by "narrative attacks," which involve misinformation, disinformation, and coordinated campaigns (often using deepfakes, bots, or compromised media) to intentionally undermine public trust, manipulate stock prices, or damage brand reputation during or after a security incident. The organization may have strong technical defenses, but if its crisis communications and external narrative are weak, the reputational and financial damage can be severe.
Why the Narrative Risk Gap Matters
Closing this gap is crucial because a misalignment between risk reality and risk perception leads to poor strategic decisions and resource allocation:
Inadequate Investment: If the executive narrative understates the risk (e.g., focusing on compliance rather than business impact), the security budget, staffing, and technology investments will be insufficient to protect business-critical assets.
Misguided Priorities: If the narrative is poorly aligned, the security team may focus resources on low-impact technical risks that are easy to measure (e.g., patching low-severity vulnerabilities) rather than prioritizing high-impact, business-critical scenarios that matter most to the C-suite.
Weak Incident Response: During an actual crisis, a pre-existing narrative gap can cripple a response. The lack of a shared understanding of risk impact can lead to slow, disorganized internal actions and a disastrous public communication strategy.
To bridge this gap, cybersecurity leaders must focus on Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ), translating technical metrics into financial terms and actionable business language that resonates with non-technical stakeholders, thereby creating a unified risk narrative.
The Narrative Risk Gap is the critical misalignment between an organization's actual technical cyber risk and the perception or story ("narrative") of that risk held by key stakeholders, such as executives, employees, and the public. ThreatNG is specifically designed to help close this gap by transforming external, publicly available information (the Conversational Attack Surface) into actionable security intelligence that protects against targeted attacks (the Human Attack Surface).
Here is a detailed explanation of how ThreatNG's capabilities help close the Narrative Risk Gap, focusing on the requested components:
External Discovery and Assessment
ThreatNG uses purely external, unauthenticated discovery to map an organization's digital footprint and identify vulnerabilities visible to attackers. Its external assessments translate technical findings into risk categories that inform a strategic narrative.
Key Assessments and Examples
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This assessment directly counters a technical risk that can feed a negative narrative. ThreatNG performs external discovery of all associated subdomains, uses DNS enumeration to find CNAME records pointing to third-party services, and then cross-references the external hostname against its comprehensive Vendor List.
Example: ThreatNG identifies a subdomain, support.mycompany.com, with a CNAME record pointing to an inactive or unclaimed service on a vendor platform, such as Zendesk (under the Customer Engagement category). This confirmed that an attacker could exploit the "dangling DNS" state to host malicious content, leading to a public incident. By identifying and prioritizing this, ThreatNG enables the security team to correct the DNS record and prevent an embarrassing and costly narrative of negligence.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This assessment focuses on intelligence to preempt social-engineering attacks that rely on believable narratives. It uses Domain Intelligence (including Domain Name Permutations) and Email Intelligence (email security presence and format prediction).
Example: A phishing campaign may use a subtly altered domain, such as mycompany-pay.com, or a homoglyph domain that is an available permutation of the official domain. ThreatNG's Domain Name Permutations feature detects these manipulations and additions using keywords such as "pay". The security team can then proactively register the malicious permutation or use the intelligence to warn employees and partners, controlling the narrative before a successful BEC attack.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: This score is directly tied to the external narrative, drawing from Sentiment and Financials Findings (e.g., lawsuits, SEC Form 8-Ks) and Domain Intelligence.
Example: ThreatNG identifies a newly registered domain permutation using "boycott" as an Action Call keyword (e.g., boycott-mycompany.com). This uncovers the start of a public opposition movement that could severely damage the brand's reputation and stock price. Security and communications teams use this intelligence to prepare a coordinated response and manage the emerging narrative.
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG provides granular investigation modules to delve into specific findings, crucial for substantiating a risk narrative for executives.
Social Media Investigation Module: This module explicitly helps safeguard the organization by closing the "Narrative Risk" gap. It turns publicly discussed security flaws (the Conversational Attack Surface) into protection against attacks on executives and employees (the Human Attack Surface).
Reddit Discovery: Functions as a Digital Risk Protection system, turning public chatter into an early warning intelligence system to manage Narrative Risk by identifying threats before they escalate.
Example: Reddit Discovery detects an employee post on a tech forum discussing a security flaw in the organization's newly released API (the Conversational Attack Surface). A threat actor could use this chatter to craft a targeted attack. The security team can then use this intelligence to patch the flaw, preempting the attack and controlling the narrative around its security posture.
LinkedIn Discovery: Identifies employees who are most susceptible to social engineering attacks. This is vital for protecting the Human Attack Surface.
MITRE ATT&CK Mapping: ThreatNG automatically translates raw findings (like leaked credentials or open ports) into a strategic narrative of adversary behavior by correlating them with specific MITRE ATT&CK techniques.
Example: ThreatNG discovers compromised credentials on the dark web and an exposed, sensitive VPN port. It maps this directly to MITRE ATT&CK techniques for Initial Access and Persistence. This narrative allows security leaders to prioritize threats based on likely exploitation and to justify investments to the boardroom with a clear business context.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
The DarCache repositories provide continuously updated, contextual data, ensuring the risk narrative is based on current, high-fidelity intelligence.
Vulnerabilities (DarCache Vulnerability): This repository is key to shifting the narrative from endless patching to prioritized risk management. It integrates information on real-world exploitability, likelihood, and potential impact.
KEV (DarCache KEV): Lists vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited in the wild. Focusing remediation efforts on these proven threats allows the security team to tell a compelling story about protecting the organization from immediate danger.
EPSS (DarCache EPSS): Provides a probabilistic estimate of a vulnerability's likelihood of being exploited. Using the EPSS score alongside the severity score allows the team to prioritize forward-looking remediation and justify resource allocation by addressing not only severe risks but also those most likely to be weaponized.
Reporting and Continuous Monitoring
Reporting: ThreatNG provides various report types, including Executive and Prioritized (High, Medium, Low, and Informational), enabling security teams to tailor narratives for different audiences. The reports include an embedded Knowledgebase with Risk levels for prioritization, Reasoning to provide context, and Recommendations to offer practical advice. This structure ensures the executive narrative is straightforward, focused on critical risks, and tied to specific actions.
Continuous Monitoring: The platform continuously monitors the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This ensures that the risk narrative presented to the board remains current and that new threats that could alter the story are identified immediately.
Complementary Solutions
While ThreatNG is an all-in-one solution, its focus on external attack surface management and digital risk protection means it can easily cooperate with solutions that handle internal operations or specific remediation tasks.
Cooperation with Internal Vulnerability and Risk Management (GRC) Solutions: ThreatNG's External GRC Assessment identifies exposed assets, critical vulnerabilities, and digital risks from an unauthenticated attacker's perspective, mapping findings directly to frameworks like NIST CSF and GDPR. This external view of compliance gaps can be fed directly into an internal GRC platform (such as those from vendors like Tenable, Qualys, or Splunk) to provide a complete, validated, "outside-in" context for the organization's risk profile.
Cooperation with Security Monitoring (SIEM/XDR) Solutions: ThreatNG's NHI Email Exposure groups high-interest emails (like Admin, Security, and Ops) from various sources, including compromised credentials. This intelligence on high-value targets can be directly imported into a SIEM/XDR system (such as Microsoft Defender XDR or Elastic Security). This allows the internal monitoring system to create highly prioritized rules and behavioral alerts specifically for external high-risk email accounts, strengthening defenses against sophisticated phishing and account takeover attempts.
