December 6, 2023
InsightsYour Biggest Online Vulnerabilities Lie Outside Your Company
The largest threats facing organizations in the digital era are posed by information created outside of a company’s systems. Across all sectors—from Target to Bud Light to Disney to Norfolk Southern—household name brands have become notorious targets for attacks right out on the open web by politically, financially, or geopolitically motivated actors.
Few are prepared to proactively engage in managing risks posed by disinformation or weaponized narratives. With the proliferation of social media platforms that cater to user’s preferences, monitoring X (formerly known as Twitter) through social listening tools no longer helps you understand what risks you face—by the time it’s on X it may be too late. Instead, you need insights into the open web, and with it the ability to understand how information moves across platforms before it causes significant damage to your key assets.
With the right tools, your team can be equipped to identify these attacks and guide the C-suite through proactive risk mitigation. Alethea’s Artemis, which moves organizations from passive listening to active risk management, delivers unrivaled insights into online risks, disinformation, and threats across the entire online ecosystem. Driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), Artemis leverages unique data sources across the open web to provide decision makers with a comprehensive understanding of the unknown risks impacting their customers, shareholders, and employees. This early and effective detection enables swift mitigation before a crisis breaks out.
Here’s the criteria we used to build Artemis, and they’re what you should look for in any product to replace or augment your social media monitoring capability:
The Problem: With the explosion of social media use, risks to your brand emerge from across the entire open web, and your consumers are getting information from multiple platforms, news sources, and forums online. To understand how these conversations impact your business, you need to understand what conversations they’re having, what narratives they might be reading, and who might be trying to influence them in what ways. These risks can often be found before they hit mainstream social media like X, Meta, Instagram, and Reddit—but you have to know where to look.
The Artemis Solution: Artemis monitors alternative platforms, blogs, forums, chatrooms, and communities, including the spaces that may be used to seed false and damaging narratives. To catch risks early, you have to look more broadly than the mainstream sources where threats have already fully materialized. Paying close attention to activity across the entire open web helps you stay one step ahead of what’s around the corner.
The Problem: The vast quantities of data online make identifying what information is impactful or threatening to your organization difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. To properly inform and guide your enterprise’s decision makers through today’s digital minefield, you need actionable insights—not a pile of data. This means finding tools that give you the knowledge to assess your organization’s online vulnerabilities, what can be done to address them, and when to act.
The Artemis Solution: Actionable data must be at the heart of advanced threat protection. With the ability to analyze large datasets at scale, Artemis sorts through millions of data points to group conversations into narratives. This enables stakeholders to detect impactful content and take swift action in near-real-time. Advanced threat detection systems like Artemis increase the effectiveness of threat detection by providing data that brings clarity, greater certainty, and a predictive value to strategic decisions.
The Problem: Traditional crisis management methods of laying low and avoiding engagement no longer work. In high-pressure situations, the C-suite will turn to their crisis management teams to navigate constantly evolving threat landscapes—problems you can’t solve while spending time sorting through irrelevant data. You need to be prepared and armed with accurate data to make quick, informed decisions that reduce the potential damages of disinformation campaigns and nefarious actors.
The Artemis Solution: Being prepared and acting quickly is crucial in staying one step ahead of the adversary. Artemis provides real-time information coverage on threats like pump and dump stock manipulation schemes, viral boycott attempts, or physical safety risks to employees. These insights allow organizations to rapidly identify and address dangerous content before it escalates into a crisis.
The Problem: When assessing the legitimacy and severity of online threats, the context of who is posting, where they’re posting, and what they’re posting is key to knowing how and when to respond. Some tools will tell you that a high volume of mentions and engagements is good and that your brand is popular while failing to alert you to any potential threats emerging from the activity. Stakeholders care about the content, narratives, and conversations that are most impactful to their mission and goals—not just what is trending on social media.
The Artemis Solution: Advanced threat detection systems should tell you why you should care about risks coming from outside your company’s systems. Artemis gives you the “so-what” and can flag the presence of specific actors, analyze a wide variety of data sources beyond mainstream social media, and surface content that is impactful. These insights form a full picture of what you’re up against and empowers you to take the appropriate action. While not all threats require a response, you need contextually accurate data when making the case to leadership to take these issues seriously.
The Problem: Real-world violence, particularly coordinated and planned events, are often foreshadowed on or even coordinated through social media. Tools that rely on keyword searches often surface content that is harmless or irrelevant, forcing you to look through a giant haystack for the few small needles of legitimate threats. But discoverable warning signs exist; you just have to know where and how to look. As organizations grow, so too does the risk of threats of violence being directed at executives, employees, or corporate events. Detecting these threats early could be the difference between your security team preventing them—or not.
The Artemis Solution: When assessing content, Artemis utilizes advanced AI and ML to go beyond a simple keyword search. This comprehensive assessment, in combination with analyst expertise, helps determine whether or not the threat is real and allows you to act quickly as appropriate. With many violent events, the warning signs percolate on social media in the days and weeks before. And with the right tools, you can detect threats of violence early and take preventative action before anything happens.
The right tools are the key to effective crisis management, and we believe that advanced threat detection systems built with these five criteria in mind are the best tools to inform mitigation strategies. Artemis has already provided actionable insights used when advising enterprise strategy on how to handle disinformation and misinformation threats. Such examples include prebunking narratives before they went viral on mainstream social media, exposing actors spreading disinformation to the press, taking legal action based on illicit activity, and creating comprehensive crisis management plans.
As threats continue to evolve, the teams that detect them early and monitor the spaces beyond mainstream social media will be the teams that succeed, saving their organizations time, money, and resources. The tools you use to mitigate online threats matter, and this is now a permanent problem that will impact every organization with an online presence. Investing in advanced threat detection is imperative to proactively safeguard brand and reputation, financial and shareholder value, and other critical assets from the impacts of disinformation, misinformation, and social media manipulation.
