Narrative Risk Management

Narrative Risk Management is a strategic security framework designed to identify, monitor, and counter harmful misinformation, disinformation, and strategic information manipulation targeting an organization. Unlike traditional cybersecurity, which protects technical assets like servers and data, Narrative Risk Management protects the "human layer" by securing the brand’s reputation and the perception of its stakeholders.

What is a Narrative Attack?

A narrative attack is a coordinated effort to spread a specific, often false or misleading, story to influence public behavior or perception. These attacks weaponize human psychology—using fear, urgency, or trust—to bypass rational thought and induce actions that benefit the attacker, such as boycotting a brand or selling stock.

Core Components of Narrative Risk Management

To manage narrative risk effectively, organizations implement several proactive defensive pillars:

• Detection and Visibility: Continuous scanning of social media, news outlets, and fringe forums to identify emerging stories before they scale.

• Sentiment and Impact Analysis: Evaluating the "velocity" and "reach" of a narrative to determine if it is gaining traction with key audiences like customers or investors.

• Attribution and Intent: Identifying the actors behind the narrative—whether they are competitors, hacktivists, or state-sponsored entities—to understand their ultimate goal.

• Counter-Narrative Strategy: Developing evidence-based messaging to dispel false claims and restore the organization’s preferred narrative.

• Vulnerability Assessment: Identifying "pre-attack signals," such as negative news or employee dissatisfaction, that make the organization a more likely target for a narrative campaign.

Why Narrative Risk Management is Essential for Modern Business

In an era of hyper-connectivity and AI-generated content, the speed of information can outpace traditional crisis communication. Narrative Risk Management provides several critical benefits:

• Financial Protection: Prevents stock price manipulation and market volatility caused by "short and distort" campaigns.

• Operational Stability: Mitigates the risk of employee strikes or consumer boycotts triggered by viral misinformation.

• Reputational Resilience: Helps organizations maintain a "single version of the truth," ensuring that their brand identity remains under their control.

• Executive Security: Protects leadership from character assassination and deepfake-driven impersonation attacks.

Narrative Risk Management vs. Traditional Digital Risk Protection (DRP)

Traditional Digital Risk Protection (DRP) focuses on identifying technical leaks, such as exposed credentials or open databases. Narrative Risk Management focuses on the context and meaning of the information being discussed.

• Traditional DRP: Detects that a confidential document has been leaked to a public forum.

• Narrative Risk Management: Detects that a coordinated group is using that leaked document to weave a story that the organization is financially failing, even if the document does not actually state that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can AI help manage narrative risk?

Yes. Organizations use advanced natural language processing (NLP) to automate the detection of bot-driven amplification and to analyze the sentiment of millions of online conversations in real time.

Is narrative risk the same as a PR crisis?

No. A PR crisis often arises from a real event. Narrative risk is a proactive security concern that involves identifying and stopping strategically manufactured crises before they cause material damage.

Who is responsible for Narrative Risk Management?

While it often involves Corporate Communications, the responsibility is increasingly shifting to the CISO and the Security Operations Center (SOC). This ensures that narrative attacks are treated as a formal security threat with the same technical urgency as a malware infection.

ThreatNG serves as an all-in-one solution for external attack surface management (EASM), digital risk protection (DRP), and security ratings. By providing a comprehensive "outside-in" perspective, it helps organizations secure their digital environment through a multi-layered approach involving technical assessments, deep-dive investigations, and continuous oversight.

Proactive External Discovery

ThreatNG performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery without using internal connectors or agents. This allows the platform to identify an organization's entire digital footprint—including shadow IT, forgotten subdomains, and cloud assets—from an attacker's perspective.

• Shadow Asset Identification: The platform scans the public internet to uncover assets such as unsanctioned cloud buckets, code repositories, and subdomains that may be invisible to internal security tools.

• Ecosystem Mapping: ThreatNG's discovery goes beyond the immediate perimeter to map an organization's third-party vendors, subcontractors, and interconnected cloud services.

Comprehensive External Assessments

ThreatNG converts raw discovery findings into actionable intelligence through a series of specialized assessments that assign security ratings from A (best) to F (worst).

• Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG identifies "dangling DNS" states by performing DNS enumeration to find CNAME records pointing to inactive or unclaimed third-party services like AWS/S3, Heroku, or Shopify.

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This assessment evaluates risk based on compromised credentials, domain name permutations, and missing security records like DMARC and SPF.

• Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure: The platform assesses 11 specific exposure vectors to identify high-privilege machine identities—such as leaked API keys and service accounts—that could be exploited.

• ESG Exposure: ThreatNG discovers and reports on publicly disclosed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) violations concerning competition, safety, and financial offenses.

Specialized Investigation Modules

The platform includes modular tools for granular entity investigation across various categories of findings.

• Sensitive Code Exposure: This module scans public code repositories (e.g., GitHub, GitLab) for leaked secrets, including Stripe API keys, AWS access tokens, and RSA private keys.

• Social Media & Narrative Risk: ThreatNG monitors the "Conversational Attack Surface" on platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn to identify emerging misinformation campaigns and employees susceptible to social engineering.

• Username Exposure: A passive reconnaissance scan is conducted across over 1,000 sites—including social media, developer forums, and gaming platforms—to determine if sensitive usernames are available or being impersonated.

• Cloud & SaaS Exposure (SaaSqwatch): This module identifies sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services and open exposed buckets across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Real-Time Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)

ThreatNG maintains continuously updated repositories that provide historical and global context to identified risks.

• DarCache Dark Web: Monitors hidden forums for mentions of an organization's assets or planned threat actor activities.

• DarCache Ransomware: Tracks the activities of over 70 ransomware gangs, including LockBit and AlphaLocker, to determine whether an organization's specific technologies are being targeted.

• DarCache Vulnerability: Integrates data from the NVD, KEV, and EPSS to predict the likelihood and potential impact of vulnerability exploitation.

Continuous Monitoring and Strategic Reporting

ThreatNG provides persistent oversight and actionable reporting to help organizations maintain a secure posture over time.

• Persistent Monitoring: The platform tracks changes in the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings for all monitored organizations 24/7.

• Strategic Reporting: Reports include Executive, Technical, and Prioritized (High to Informational) formats, along with External GRC Assessment Mappings for frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST CSF.

• MITRE ATT&CK Mapping: ThreatNG automatically correlates raw technical findings with specific adversary techniques to prioritize threats based on their likelihood of exploitation.

Cooperation with Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG acts as an external intelligence feeder, enhancing the effectiveness of internal security controls through its integration with complementary solutions.

• Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): ThreatNG provides the "Legal-Grade Attribution" and irrefutable evidence required for SOAR platforms to automatically trigger incident response playbooks—such as blocking a malicious IP or rotating a leaked credential—without manual intervention.

• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): While EDR protects internal devices, ThreatNG identifies the external "Attack Path Choke Points" that adversaries use to bypass these defenses, allowing teams to disrupt breach narratives before they reach the endpoint.

• Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Tools: By feeding continuous, outside-in evaluation data into GRC tools, ThreatNG replaces slow, claims-based surveys with real-time technical evidence that ensures regulatory obligations are met.

• Public Relations and Brand Protection Tools: By monitoring online sentiment and social media chatter, ThreatNG provides the technical data needed for communications teams to issue precise counter-narratives against disinformation.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does ThreatNG provide "Legal-Grade Attribution"?

ThreatNG uses the Context Engine™ to fuse technical security findings with decisive legal, financial, and operational context. This process, known as Multi-Source Data Fusion, provides security leaders with the absolute certainty required to justify security investments and accelerate remediation.

What is the Correlation Evidence Questionnaire (CEQ)?

The CEQ is a dynamically generated solution that replaces subjective, claims-based assessments with irrefutable, observed evidence of risk. It provides a precise, prioritized operational mandate for remediation by correlating technical findings with business logic.

Can ThreatNG identify vulnerabilities in my specific technology stack?

Yes. The Technology Stack Identification capability externally discovers nearly 4,000 technologies in use—from cloud infrastructure to AI models—allowing for precise targeting of patches based on real-world exposure.