Combatting Business Disinformation

Disinformation is the deliberate spreading of false information with the intent to deceive or manipulate a target audience. From social media posts to spurious news websites, you’ve probably viewed disinformation. The World Economic Forum identifies the proliferation of false content as the leading short-term global risk in 2025 for a second consecutive year. (Global Risks Report 2025)

Fake news is reported almost daily. According to the Alan Turing Institute, 94% of people in the UK  have witnessed misinformation on social media. Types of misinformation (usually a mistake) and disinformation (intentional) are classified by FirstDraft News as:

• Fabricated – completely false information or images, intended to deceive and/or do harm.
• Misleading – disingenuous use of information to implicate an individual or raise an issue.
• Imposter – impersonating genuine sources.
• Manipulated – involving the manipulation of genuine details to deceive.
• False Context – sharing genuine information with false contextual information.
• False Connection – using headlines, captions or visuals that don’t support the content.
• Satire/Parody – intended to fool but not to cause harm.

With a growing number of people accessing their news online and the prolific use of AI-generated content, the amount of disinformation is set to increase.

Disinformation Security Steps

Within a constantly changing landscape, three key approaches help businesses implement disinformation security:

1. Examination of internal processes to:

• strengthen processes to validate user and source identity,
• continually risk score to prevent account takeover,
• ensure strong contextual awareness to identify harmful narratives, and
• implement a Continuous Adaptive Trust (CAT) model, adjusting access permissions based on real-time user behaviour and risk assessments.

2. Education to improve internal security knowledge.

Technology alone isn’t enough to combat disinformation and cybercrime. An Employee Risk Assessment reviews susceptibility to targeted phishing attacks and what data could be stolen. The outcome informs proactive cyber security training to reduce human cyber risk.

3. Eradication of external sources of disinformation through your:

• Web administrator: Report the false news and provide all necessary information for them to act.
• Hosting provider: If the site violates hosting rules the provider may terminate services to the site owner, leading to site disconnection.
• Search engines: While the data may not be removed, it can be deleted from search results.
• Reputation experts: If appropriate expertise is unavailable internally, outsourcing to professionals is a sensible option.

“Protecting your business against disinformation is an emerging and important form of cyber security,” says Eric Hughes of EMH Technology. ” Educating your teams to spot disingenuous communication is as important as the technology that can be put in place to combat and prevent disinformation.”

Would you like to discuss your business’s approach to protecting the credibility and legitimacy of its information?

The friendly technology experts at EMH Technology would welcome a discussion without obligation. Let’s explore how your cyber security can be adapted to combat disinformation.