Disinformation Security: The New Pillar of Cybersecurity Strategy

Gartner’s 2025 insights underscore why defending against disinformation is now a boardroom priority. As AI-driven deepfakes and narrative attacks rise, Fortune 500 leaders are treating “disinformation security” as a critical component of modern cybersecurity strategy.

Why Disinformation Is a Boardroom Priority in 2025

In 2025, disinformation has leapfrogged from a fringe IT problem to a core business risk that demands board-level attention. The reason is simple: malicious falsehoods can inflict real-world damage on a company’s reputation, stock value, and security posture. Corporate disinformation campaigns are estimated to cost the global economy $78 billion annually, and the World Economic Forum warns that AI-driven misinformation is now the “biggest short-term threat” to the global economy. High-profile incidents – from deepfake videos of CEOs to fake news driving stock crashes – have made it clear that false information can be as damaging as a data breach. As a result, executives are asking not just “How secure are our networks?” but also “Can we trust the information we see and share?”

Gartner’s 2025 Executive Briefing on Disinformation Security drives home this point: it identifies disinformation security as an emerging pillar of enterprise cybersecurity strategy. In fact, Gartner analysts predict that by the late 2020s, roughly 50% of enterprises will have invested in disinformation defense tools, up from less than 5% in 2024. This dramatic shift– from virtually zero adoption to half of all companies in just a few years– underlines how quickly the issue has risen to prominence. Simply put, defending against “fake news” and coordinated misinformation is no longer just a PR concern; it’s a C-suite and boardroom concern integral to protecting business value and trust.

Key Technologies for Disinformation Defense

Effectively combatting disinformation requires a new toolkit of technologies and practices. There is no single silver-bullet solution, so organizations are adopting a suite of tools aimed at authenticating content and detecting manipulations. Key technologies in the disinformation security arsenal include:

Deepfake Detection: Advanced AI-driven systems can analyze videos, audio, and images to identify signs of manipulation or synthetic generation. These tools help organizations spot doctored videos or AI-generated voices before they can fool employees or the public. Deepfake detection has become essential as generative AI makes it trivial for bad actors to create “fake videos, voices, and images that impersonate people or organizations.”
Impersonation Prevention: Disinformation often involves someone pretending to be someone else – for example, a hacker posing as a CEO in an email or a fraudulent social media account impersonating a brand. Impersonation prevention technologies verify identity and authenticity in digital communications. For instance, if an employee receives an email seemingly from the CEO, disinformation security tools can analyze the content, metadata, and source to detect signs of fraud or spoofing and quarantine the message. Similarly, enhanced identity assurance measures (like anti-deepfake voice authentication or verified sender frameworks) fall into this category.
Narrative Intelligence & Media Monitoring: An emerging capability, narrative intelligence involves monitoring mass media and social platforms for emerging damaging or false narratives that could target the company’s leaders, products, or brand. Instead of waiting for a rumor or hoax to go viral, companies use AI-powered monitoring to detect early signals of coordinated misinformation campaigns. Platforms like PeakMetrics exemplify this approach – PeakMetrics’ narrative intelligence platform monitors millions of online sources (including fringe sites and social media) to spot manipulated narratives and adversarial trends before they cause harm. By clustering related content and assessing source credibility, such tools provide “early warnings and critical insights” into developing disinformation attacks.
Content Authentication and Fact-Checking: To verify what’s real, some organizations are turning to content authenticity frameworks – for example, digital watermarks or cryptographic signatures embedded in legitimate media to prove origin. In tandem, AI-based fact-checking tools can cross-check claims and flag inconsistencies. Gartner notes that emerging disinformation security tech is used for “content authenticity, identity assurance, fraud prevention, fact checking and brand reputation” protection. These technologies, combined, aim to ensure the information reaching decision-makers and the public can be trusted.

Crucially, Gartner emphasizes that disinformation security is not a single technology, but a strategy that spans multiple tools and functions. Organizations should evaluate where their current systems are vulnerable to disinformation (from email channels to social media presence) and layer in the appropriate defenses – whether that’s deploying deepfake detection in videoconferences or implementing stricter verification for financial transactions. In short, combating disinformation is a holistic effort to “ensure information is accurate, verify authenticity, prevent impersonation and monitor the spread of harmful content.”

Cross-Functional Effort: Operational Impact Across Departments

One reason disinformation security has the C-suite’s attention is that fighting falsehoods isn’t just an IT issue – it touches every corner of the enterprise. Gartner observes that effective disinformation defense must unite “technology, people and processes across executive leadership, security teams, public relations, marketing, finance, human resources, legal counsel and sales.” In practice, this means multiple departments need to coordinate their efforts:

Executive Leadership: The CEO and board must champion disinformation resilience as a strategic priority. This might involve updating risk management frameworks to include information integrity risks and investing in new counter-disinformation capabilities. Leaders also need to be prepared as potential targets – for example, being the face of the company, an executive could be impersonated in phishing attacks or deepfake videos. Board members are increasingly asking for regular briefings on disinformation threats and response plans, much as they do for cyber threats.
Communications and PR: The communications team sits on the front lines of disinformation incidents. They are responsible for monitoring the media landscape for fake news about the company and crafting timely, effective responses. In a world where a false rumor can trend within hours, PR teams must have crisis communication plans specifically for disinformation events. This includes protocols for quickly correcting false information in public, engaging with social media platforms to take down fake content, and proactively educating stakeholders (customers, investors, employees) when a disinformation campaign is underway. The PR department’s close collaboration with narrative intelligence platforms and threat intelligence teams is essential to stay ahead of adversarial narratives.
Cybersecurity & IT: The security team must extend its remit beyond network firewalls to what Gartner calls threats “outside the corporate-controlled network.” This includes integrating disinformation monitoring into threat intelligence operations – for example, treating a coordinated smear campaign or social media impersonation attempt as an attack on the company that warrants incident response. Security teams will deploy many of the technologies mentioned earlier (deepfake detection, email authentication tools, web takedown services for fake domains, etc.) and work closely with IT to implement them. They also need to harden internal systems against novel attack vectors like AI-generated phishing (e.g. GenAI-crafted emails that perfectly mimic a brand’s tone). In essence, cybersecurity now must cover information integrity as well as data integrity.
Marketing and Sales: These teams are stewards of the brand and customer trust, so they have a stake in disinformation security too. Marketing departments should watch for brand impersonation – fake websites, accounts, or ads mimicking the company – and coordinate with IT/legal to take action when discovered. They also play a role in pre-bunking and education: informing customers how to verify official company communications and avoid falling for scams. Sales teams, meanwhile, might need training to handle client questions that arise from viral misinformation (for example, a false claim about a product defect spreading online).
Legal and Compliance: The legal team may need to pursue takedowns or legal remedies against disinformation actors, especially in cases of defamation or fraud. They also must navigate the legal landscape of content moderation and free speech – advising the company on what actions it can take. Additionally, compliance officers should be mindful of emerging regulations (some jurisdictions are considering laws against deepfakes or manipulated media). Legal will be key in establishing partnerships with social media platforms and law enforcement for information sharing during major disinformation incidents.

In sum, building resilience against disinformation is a cross-functional mission. Just as cybersecurity matured to involve every employee (through phishing training, data handling policies, etc.), disinformation defense requires organization-wide awareness. From HR training employees not to spread unverified information, to finance keeping an eye on market manipulation rumors, each department has a role in the larger strategy.

AI: The Double-Edged Sword in the Disinformation War

The rise of generative AI has supercharged both the attack and defense in disinformation campaigns. On one hand, AI is enabling threat actors to create fake content at an unprecedented scale and believability. Generative models can churn out persuasive fake articles, realistic images, and even live-sounding audio or video “deepfakes” impersonating key figures – all at minimal cost and speed. For example, malicious actors can use GPT-style bots to spread false narratives across thousands of social accounts, or use deepfake software to mimic an executive’s voice on a phone call. Gartner notes that threat actors are actively “using GenAI to create disinformation at scale — and spread it before organizations can respond.” This means attacks can evolve and multiply faster than a traditional human-centered response can manage, creating a game of whack-a-mole for defenders.

On the other hand, AI is also indispensable to the defense against disinformation. The very scale of the challenge (millions of posts, images, videos flowing daily) is far beyond manual human capacity to monitor or verify. Organizations are therefore deploying AI and machine learning tools to sift through content, detect anomalies, and flag potential falsehoods in real time. For instance, machine learning models can be trained to identify the telltale signatures of a deepfake video, or to cross-correlate news stories with known facts to assess credibility. Gartner’s experts urge tech leaders to bake “disinformation-proofing” into their products by leveraging AI/ML for content verification and data provenance tracking. In practice, this might involve AI that checks if an image has an authentic origin (or has been doctored), or blockchain-style ledgers that track how data has been altered over time.

The role of AI in defense is not just in detection, but also in response. Some platforms now use AI to generate rapid counter-messaging or fact-checking reports when a false narrative starts trending, thereby automating the first line of response. Additionally, AI-driven network analysis can map how a disinformation campaign is spreading – identifying the bot networks or influencer accounts amplifying a lie – which helps responders know where to intervene.

That said, the AI arms race between attackers and defenders is ongoing. As deepfakes and text generation become more sophisticated (e.g. AI models that mimic writing style or voice perfectly), defenders must continually update their algorithms to keep up. Gartner analysts recommend that enterprises seek assurances from security vendors about their capabilities to detect and deal with AI-driven threats like deepfakes, and to favor those investing in forward-looking R&D on this front. In essence, staying ahead in disinformation security will require embracing AI-driven defenses as a core component of your cybersecurity strategy – while also understanding AI is powering the threat you’re fighting.

From Insight to Action: Recommendations for Enterprise Leaders

Disinformation security may be a new domain, but there are concrete steps leaders can take today to strengthen their organizations against this evolving threat. Here are actionable recommendations for enterprise and security leaders to consider:

Make Disinformation Defense a Formal Part of Cyber Strategy: Don’t treat misinformation risks as an ad hoc PR issue. Incorporate disinformation scenarios into your enterprise risk management and cybersecurity strategies to enhance resilience. For example, update your incident response plans to include response playbooks for disinformation attacks (whether it's a viral false rumor or a deepfake-based phishing scam). Gartner’s inclusion of disinformation security in top tech trends is a signal that this needs to be a planned investment area, not a reactive one.
Invest in Tools and Partnerships: Evaluate and invest in technologies that address your most relevant disinformation risks. This might mean deploying a narrative monitoring platform (for early detection of harmful stories), integrating a deepfake detection API into your video conferencing and email systems, or upgrading identity verification for financial transactions. Work with trusted vendors – for example, platforms like PeakMetrics are now available to help monitor and decode emerging narrative threats using AI. Also establish partnerships with social media platforms, industry groups, and possibly law enforcement, so you have channels to report and counter serious disinformation incidents.
Create a Cross-Functional Task Force: Break down silos by forming a disinformation resilience task force that brings together security, IT, communications, legal, and other key stakeholders. This team should meet regularly to share information on emerging threats (e.g. new deepfake trends or active misinformation in your sector) and coordinate readiness. A cross-functional team ensures that technical measures (like blocking a spoofed domain) are coupled with communication measures (like alerting customers to the spoof) in a unified response. It also sends a message internally that everyone has a role in maintaining information integrity.
Educate and Train Employees: Just as employee awareness is crucial for cyber threats, it’s equally vital for disinformation. Conduct training sessions to help employees (especially customer-facing teams and executives) recognize common disinformation tactics – for instance, how to spot a doctored video or a phishing email written by AI. Encourage a culture of verifying information before reacting or sharing. Employees should know how to report suspicious communications or viral rumors through proper channels. Remember that a well-intentioned but uninformed employee can accidentally amplify a false narrative; education is the best countermeasure.
Monitor the Threat Landscape Actively: Leverage threat intelligence focused on information threats. This includes keeping tabs on narratives and chatter relevant to your industry on social media, forums, and even the dark web. Many disinformation campaigns have precursors – discussions in fringe communities or small-scale tests – that can serve as early warnings if noticed. As Gartner suggests, monitoring for “influence operations aimed at swaying public sentiment” can help catch a campaign in its infancy. Early detection can make the difference in defusing a false story before it goes viral.
Engage in Scenario Planning: Lastly, prepare your leadership by running tabletop exercises or simulations of disinformation crises. For example, simulate what you would do if a deepfake video of your CEO announcing a fake product recall started circulating, or if a coordinated social media attack spread false claims about a data breach. Practicing these scenarios will expose gaps in your response plan and build confidence in your team’s ability to respond under pressure. It’s better to learn and fix issues in a drill than during a real incident.

Conclusion

Disinformation security is rapidly becoming an indispensable pillar of cybersecurity strategy. As we head toward 2027, forward-looking enterprises are treating the integrity of information as mission-critical, alongside the confidentiality and availability of their systems. Gartner’s foresight that half of organizations will soon invest in disinformation defenses is a clarion call – those who ignore this trend do so at their peril. The good news is that by taking proactive steps now – adopting the right technologies, fostering cross-department collaboration, and leveraging AI for defense – leaders can get ahead of the disinformation threat. In a business environment where trust and truth are competitive assets, shoring up your organization’s resilience against disinformation isn’t just an IT mandate, but a strategic imperative owned from the boardroom down. By viewing disinformation security as the next evolution of cybersecurity, enterprise leaders can protect their brands, stakeholders, and bottom line from the digital lies that threaten to undermine them.

(Note: This post is informed by insights from the 2025 Gartner Executive Briefing on Disinformation Security and industry trends. It highlights why communications and security executives must elevate disinformation defense in their strategic planning.)