Disinformation security: Defending your brand value and keeping customer trust

Written by Tom Montague - Sales Director.

In today’s fiercely-contested B2C and B2B markets, trustworthiness and reputation are absolutes for leading brands. Your product or service might be unquestionably superior, yet without impeccable brand values, your business is vulnerable to malicious messages that influence whether customers buy or fly.

Cybersecurity breaches can cause reputational damage to a company’s profile, leading to multiple impacts, including adverse publicity, brand erosion, and loss of customer trust. The impacts can be particularly severe for smaller businesses or those heavily reliant on direct customer interaction.

Protecting enterprises against possible reputational damage has long been part of cybersecurity’s function remit, but now organisations are having to prepare to deal with sneaky digital slurs that circulate outside of their security perimeter. 

Misinformation and disinformation attacks are launched and directed at targets in the public domain, typically using information exchange platforms such as social media. These attacks usually take the form of posts containing fabricated claims and assertions, fake news, and negative feedback on consumer websites. Targets of disinformation attacks may be unaware that they’re being publicly tarnished – until it starts to hurt their bottom line.

It’s important to distinguish between the two terms. Misinformation is the propagation of false or inaccurate facts. Disinformation, however, is the more harmful hazard.

This refers to deliberately falsified information meant to mislead with the intention of leaving a damaging impression or prejudice against a named target. While misinformation may be unintentional, disinformation is intentionally detrimental.

Respondents to the World Economic Forum’s ‘Global Risks Report 2025’ rated misinformation and disinformation jointly as the fourth most critical risks their organisations face (after geo-economic confrontation, extreme weather events, and state-based armed conflict).

The report – based on the views of 900+ global risk experts, policy-makers and industry leaders – also found that respondents expect misinformation and disinformation to move to the top of their risk challenges by 2027, outranking cyber-espionage and warfare.

The spread of false information is now a major issue for corporates across vertical sectors. For example, misinformation and disinformation around biotech is ‘a serious problem’, the World Economic Forum warns, with biohackers, who are not medical professionals, touting health remedies or performance-enhancing procedures based on biotech.

It’s long been recognised that the Internet propagates falsehoods at unprecedented speed and scale. We now have Generative AI which, even if not used maliciously, sucks up those falsehoods and gives them a coating of credibility when included in its outputs.

Disinformation can then be included in online references without being independently checked. Rather, customers are likely to assume that if a fact about your business is wrong, then it would have been picked up and corrected long before.

In 2023, researchers from Cardiff University and Stanford University reviewed marketing research which focused on the consequences of misinformation dissemination.

They distinguished between direct and indirect misinformation. 

Forms of direct brand-related misinformation include fake news, where false information is intentionally distributed online and is designed to mimic the format of legitimate news sources, plus fake product reviews. In contrast, ‘indirect misinformation’ is misinformation that, while not specifically targeting brands or products, pertains to broader social, scientific, or political topics.

The research found that when consumers are exposed to direct misinformation, this could exert influence over their spending habits, regardless of whether or not they believe it.

Even when exposed to indirect misinformation, when it isn’t related to brands but linked to other issues or events, the Cardiff/Stanford researchers said that consumers ‘Can experience confusion and doubt which could affect their spending decisions.’

So what can be done to protect your business’s reputation and brand values against the likelihood of being targeted by a malevolent misinformation/disinformation campaign? Remember, this is a threat that currently falls largely outside of standard cybersecurity safeguards and barriers.

Disinformation security is an emerging category of technology that systematically discerns trust and aims to provide methodological systems for ensuring integrity, assessing authenticity, preventing impersonation, and tracking the spread of harmful information.

Gartner predicts that by 2028 some 50 per cent of enterprises will begin adopting products, services or features designed to address disinformation security use-cases. That’s up from less than five per cent of organisations that adopted these tools in 2024, the analyst adds.

Disinformation security refers to the strategies, technologies, and processes used to detect, analyse, and counteract the spread of the varieties of false or misleading manipulative information in digital environments.

One of Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025, disinformation security is designed to help identify what can be trusted. It has three interconnected goals:

• To create systems that ensure accurate information
• To verify authenticity and prevent impersonation
• To monitor and map the spread of harmful content

Businesses will use such systems to combat disinformation by proactively monitoring their digital profile, developing strong communication strategies, and raising media literacy among their workforces. Ultimately, disinformation security tools will provide evidence to counteract outbreaks of reputational and brand damage. 

Company chiefs should also recognise that the fight against the twin perils of misinformation and disinformation is not just a technological challenge, but a strategic business imperative. Moving toward the implementation of a disinformation security strategy, organisations can begin to build defences against this growing challenge.

Want to learn how your business can stay ahead of misinformation threats?

At Howden, we understand the evolving risks to reputation and brand integrity. Our expert-led insurance and risk advisory solutions are designed to help UK businesses create a more resilient buffer against emerging digital threats, including disinformation.

If you’d like to find out more about how Howden can safeguard your business, request a call back below.