Disinformation Security and Resilience: The Speed-to-Truth Framework

On November 10, 2025, Papa John’s stock rose 18% on news of an acquisition offer. Coming just days after a failed buyout, the announcement erased nearly all of the past week’s losses. There was just one problem—the story was completely fake.

Bad actors planted fabricated news, distributed it through press release services, and watched it spread through AI-driven news aggregators. Before anyone caught on, the fake story had shifted the company’s market cap by hundreds of millions of dollars. And the originators likely profited handsomely from the pump-and-dump scheme.

This isn’t an isolated incident—it’s a growing threat. As artificial intelligence and algorithms increasingly drive everything from content curation to financial decisions, disinformation campaigns can cause significant harm. Here, we’ll cover how disinformation can impact your business, common vulnerabilities that hackers exploit, and how to protect your organization.

What Is Disinformation Security?

Disinformation security is the practice of detecting, preventing, and responding to intentionally false or manipulated information that could harm an organization’s people, operations, finances, or reputation. At its core, effective disinformation security is about speed-to-truth, the ability to rapidly detect questionable information, verify what is accurate, and communicate trusted guidance before false narratives can take hold.

Disinformation security uses a converged security approach to protect against false information that’s being spread intentionally and maliciously. Disinformation protection is often included in a company’s cybersecurity umbrella, since disinformation often spreads online, and digital tools are some of the most effective in detecting and combating it. But you shouldn’t ignore legacy media and its potential to inflict harm with false narratives.

Disinformation security has three primary goals:

• Ensure only accurate information is created and disseminated
• Establish authenticity and prevent forgeries or impersonation
• Monitor, track, and prevent false or harmful content

Imagine a food company is hit with a slew of social media posts falsely claiming its products caused widespread illness. The disinformation security team—combining cybersecurity, PR, and legal—springs into action. They track the campaign’s spread online, coordinate platform takedowns, and proactively brief journalists to take control of the narrative on traditional news outlets.

Information security vs disinformation security

While information security and disinformation security are closely related, they protect different assets and address different types of risk.

In practice, the two disciplines are complementary. Information security protects the integrity of data itself, while disinformation security protects how information—true or false—is perceived, amplified, and acted upon.

Together, they form a more complete security posture.

Types of false information

Beyond disinformation, your organization also faces threats from misinformation and malinformation. Some people use the terms interchangeably, but you should understand the difference if you want to defend against them.

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency defines the terms as follows:

• Misinformation is false, but given or used without malicious intent. For example, if you accidentally told someone your business hours were 8 am–5 pm when you actually opened at 9 am, that would be misinformation.
• Disinformation is created, given, or used with intent to harm or manipulate. For example, if you put out a press release claiming a huge profit when you were actually breaking even, that would be disinformation.
• Malinformation is based on fact, but used in a deceptive way with malicious intent. For example, if someone leaked a private email thread discussing negotiations with a vendor in hopes of derailing the deal, that would be malinformation.

A comprehensive approach to disinformation risk management will often encompass all three types of false information.

For example, tools to spot false information will flag content regardless of intent. While detection mechanisms often overlap, response strategies for accidental misinformation typically fall outside the core scope of a disinformation security program.

How Does Disinformation Threaten Your Business?

If we can’t seem to shake disinformation from the global risk landscape, it’s because bad actors continue to refine their methods.

As Ian Phillips, Director of the News & Media Division at the United Nations (and renowned propaganda expert) notes on The Employee Safety Podcast, disinformation can be sneaky. “I have been at times looking on social media in that moment of breaking news and major events, trying to understand what’s happening… I’ve looked at accounts that I think are true, and they’re actually fake. And I didn’t realize until a few hours later.” He continues, “That is a terrible situation to be in, and I consider myself media literate.”

In order for companies to fight bad information and improve transparency with employees, Phillips believes we need more media literacy training.

Disinformation can take on many different forms, but some of the most common include:

• Forged emails or text messages used for phishing attacks
• AI-generated deepfakes including images, videos, or audio recordings
• False rumors or fake news stories
  Manipulated screenshots and photos
• Fake copies of your company’s websites or apps hosted on similar domains

This content spreads through social media platforms, messaging apps, news aggregators, and email. Thanks to bots and the general breakneck speed of internet culture, fake news can leak from one person to a worldwide audience in seconds.

For example, imagine someone who wants to harm your business creates a deepfake audio recording of your CEO. She’s going on a profanity-laced tirade about your customers. The clip goes on social media at 6 pm on a Friday, and by Saturday morning, it feels like it’s taken over the internet. You can refute the clip and probably even share a technical analysis proving the recording was AI-generated. But the reputational damage will already be done in many people’s eyes.

Aside from influencing public opinion, disinformation causes other problems, such as:

• Disruptions or mistakes when employees act on bad intelligence
• Internal confusion
• Manufactured dissent and conflict
• Unnecessary legal issues
• Financial damage from lost revenue
• Time and money spent on remediation efforts

In disinformation incidents, accuracy alone isn’t enough. The organizations that fare best are those that reach the truth fastest. Delays—even when information is eventually corrected—allow false narratives to solidify, influence decisions, and cause lasting harm. Speed-to-truth is often the difference between a contained incident and a cascading crisis.

How Do You Build a Resilient Disinformation Security Program?

Disinformation security works best when you act early. Integrate it with your broader programs, such as business resilience and crisis communications. During disruptions, your teams need accurate information to operate safely. Crises create perfect conditions for disinformation attacks—people are anxious and hungry for updates. Prepare for these attacks before they happen.

Speed-to-truth enablers

As you develop your disinformation security program, focus on the capabilities that enable speed to truth. Six core pillars make this possible:

• Detection and early warning: The sooner you address the disinformation, the easier you can squash it. Use automation to continuously monitor channels of interest and flag concerning content, but keep a human vetting step at the end of the funnel to be sure you don’t act on a false alarm.
• Verification framework: Develop a clear set of fact-checking guidelines and how to decide what’s actionable intelligence. Integrate workflows across teams and departments—siloed data is a green flag for disinformation.
• Communication discipline: If you want to control the narrative, be prepared to issue frequent, accurate, and engaging content. Develop internal templates to rapidly collect vetted information, external-facing holding statements, and an easily followed process for when and how to release content.
• Governance and ownership: When you’re countering disinformation, you need the right person with the right information to respond. Establish a RACI chart for disinformation security, detailing who’s responsible, who’s accountable, who to consult, and who to inform.
• Education and training: Provide ongoing training to employees on how to spot disinformation, what protocols to follow, and who the key stakeholders are to contact. Run quarterly tabletop exercises to get your team comfortable with the process and expose any weak points in your disinformation security plans.
• Measurement and continuous improvement: During exercises and real disinformation crises, track speed-to-truth metrics like time-to-truth, time-to-response, rumor longevity, and recovery time. Quantifiable data can help set expectations and improve your strategies and processes for dealing with disinformation.

What Tactics and Technologies Are Effective for Disinformation Defense?

Threat actors use emerging technologies like generative AI to create and spread disinformation. While nothing can fully replace human critical thinking in separating fact from fiction, augmenting your team with high-tech solutions can give you a leg up.

Technology plays a critical role in compressing the time between detection and decision. The right tools don’t replace human judgment—they accelerate speed-to-truth by surfacing, correlating, and validating information faster than any manual process.

Consider these key tools and tactics:

• Real-time monitoring: Use a combination of AI-powered open source intelligence and proprietary data-gathering to collect as much information as possible. Flag key terms and analyze across all media and channels to help spot trends you might otherwise miss.
• Integrated communications: Automate and link your processes from intelligence collection to vetting to mass notification. This cuts minutes off your response time when pushing out critical alerts. Prioritize by source and severity.
• Human analysis and approval: In some instances, like weather alerts, pushing out fully automated information is relatively low-risk. However, it’s important to maintain a human presence throughout your disinformation security pipeline, as machine learning algorithms can be manipulated with disinformation to produce unintended results.

Consider a real-world scenario where employees at one of your warehouses are reporting an active shooter evacuation order that came through their email. It didn’t come from your company’s mass notification platform, but the on-site team is rightfully scared and confused.

Imagine if this was a manual process—employees at the warehouse would need to decide who to contact. Once your security team eventually got wind of it, they’d need to research whether the evacuation order was warranted, decide how to respond, and push out a notification.

Now instead, picture a fully automated process. The warehouse team follows your enterprise-wide protocol to forward suspicious messages to an automated monitoring tool that performs initial analysis, collects potentially relevant data, and flags a security team member for immediate action. With a clear picture in hand, they can make a rapid decision on how to proceed and push out updated instructions. Drastically reducing the time-to-truth can make a huge difference, regardless of the situation on the ground.

How Do You Prepare for the Next Era of Disinformation?

Disinformation security isn’t a nice-to-have for companies with huge cybersecurity teams. It’s a must-have for any organization. Information flows around the world in real-time, 24 hours per day. And fake news can cause irreparable harm in a matter of minutes. Your organization needs a security lifecycle that minimizes the chance for disinformation to spread, quickly detects it when it pops up, shortens time-to-truth, and immediately mitigates the risk it creates.

Technical solutions based on AI risk management are key. But more importantly, you need to nurture a company-wide culture focused on information accuracy and authenticity. Empowering employees to verify and stabilize information will protect your organization and minimize the opportunity for malicious content to inflict harm.

In the next era of disinformation, resilience won’t be defined by who has the most information but by who reaches the truth fastest. Building speed-to-truth in your security, communications, and decision-making processes ensures your organization can detect false narratives early, validate facts quickly, and respond with confidence before disinformation gains momentum.