Misinformation Campaigns and the Need for Enhanced Cybersecurity

The digital transformation across industries has elevated ransomware attacks and this should be addressed through strategic cybersecurity measures.

Digital transformation of enterprises across the world significantly improves business growth, increases revenue, minimizes production costs, and reduces workload. The Covid-19 pandemic saw an escalation in the number of industries embracing digital technologies and automation. As the old wise saying goes 'every coin has two sides', the coin of digital transformation also has another side to it. Since it is easier to speak about the benefits, people often ignore a discussion on the flaws. Misinformation is such a digital malware that has recently descended in the world of the internet.

The crippling cyberattacks and threats of ransomware demand an efficient and robust cybersecurity operation across all industries. In recent years, disinformation has taken over cyberspace. Disinformation is a close kin of misinformation with only one difference that disinformation aims at deliberately deceiving targets. A report by Livemint says, "A growing group of cybersecurity thinkers believe that disinformation is a new weapon in these psychologically driven attacks—one that will be used by cyber attackers too, perhaps for extortion, market manipulation or to damage the reputation of a rival company."

Social media campaigns play a huge part in spreading misinformation in the new era. Considering the influence of social media on people, it is easier to manipulate the content and spread it across the internet. According to an article by Security Magazine, the rise in misinformation campaigns will be a major trend of 2021 to drive up costs of ransomware payments, and in some cases, influence markets to manipulate stock prices. It is high time that companies introduce the best cybersecurity measures and threat management systems to predict and resolve such grave cyber breaches. Let us take a look at some of the ways in which an enterprise can prepare to deal with disinformation and misinformation campaigns.

Know Your Social Media Platform

A company should have internal social media teams to constantly go through their own social media pages, posts, and algorithms. It is necessary to understand that the bad actors are continuously tracking social media accounts of enterprises to understand online behaviour, company initiatives, and biases. This information is sensitive and hence can be used to manipulate to spread disinformation and demand ransomware. Chief Security Officers (CSO) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) should initiate a team to monitor social media to understand the company image and detect any threats.

Develop Strategies to Detect and Intercept Cyberattacks

Attackers often use the dark web to propagate and gather data to attack organizations. Companies should develop control strategies to detect online threats by accessing the dark web and unstructured data sources that enable a better understanding of the activities surrounding their company. Anticipating attacks before they occur can reduce the damage and often help prevent it from happening. Since data collection from darknets is a difficult nut to crack, methods like scraping, crawling, or involving a third-party service, can enable companies to extract data from these dark webs.

Data Backups and AI-Driven

Regular backing up of data and important information is necessary to keep cyber attacks away. The backed up data should be encrypted and stored in a safe network system. It will be helpful if these encrypted data is stored in a separate network system rather than the usual ones. AI subsets like deep learning and machine learning are useful in processing unstructured data. AI enables automation of security processes and this helps in cost-reduction and minimizing risks.

These strategies help in timely detection and prevention of misinformation campaigns from getting serious. Ransomware attacks are getting sophisticated each day and strict security planning is necessary to tackle them. Automation is a significant method to enable the processing of huge datasets in less time. Even though misinformation and disinformation are looming over the world of the internet, there is a hope for better digitization strategies in the future.