The following is a guest post from Dymah Paige, director analyst with the Gartner Finance practice. Opinions are the author’s own.
Artificial intelligence has accelerated misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (hereafter referred to as disinformation) from a reputational nuisance into a significant financial and enterprise risk globally. Information integrity is the top emerging risk threatening the reputation and bottom line of both private and public sectors, according to the 1Q26 Gartner Emerging Risks report.
Despite this, fewer than half of executives have mechanisms in place to address disinformation. This is the unsurprising result of scattered risk planning and unclear disinformation security ownership, a distinct discipline that overlaps with, and is not a subset of, cybersecurity.
Why this risk is high on the CFO agenda today
The CFO’s personal accountability for driving business resilience and ensuring compliance puts the CFO at the helm of orchestrating corporate strategies. The CFO must marshal the C-suite — chief information security officer, chief information officer, chief communications officer, chief revenue officer, general counsel and/or chief marketing officer — to assess the organization’s gaps and fund a unified disinformation security stack that delivers impersonation prevention, content authenticity and narrative intelligence.
CFOs who fail to deploy these tools ethically and reliably are effectively ceding control of their corporate mission, values and valuations to bot-driven campaigns or bad actors, whether external or employees.
This urgency was further exacerbated on March 6, when the White House released “President Trump’s Cyber Strategy for America,” which encourages the private sector to deploy both defensive and offensive cyber operations to detect and defeat adversaries before they breach networks. It also aims to streamline incident reporting under the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022.
The most recent cybersecurity-related executive order, EO 14390 “Combating cybercrime, fraud, and predatory schemes against American citizens,” reinforces this by calling on the private sector to help identify adversary networks, tactics and techniques.
These documents are expected to be followed by more executive actions and possible legislative actions in Congress, which, if passed, will codify many of these strategies into law.
The three core elements of disinformation security
Gartner has identified three main categories of disinformation security tools:
1. Impersonation prevention. These technologies are evolving beyond traditional anti-phishing measures to address sophisticated, AI-driven identity attacks targeting brands, executives and customers.
Prevalent use cases: Brand protection, which involves detecting and initiating the takedown of spoofed websites and fraudulent social media profiles, exacerbated with AI-driven lures.
2. Content authenticity. These solutions counter AI-generated video, images and audio content by verifying the integrity and provenance of digital media.
Prevalent use cases: Detecting deepfakes to prevent fraudulent synthetic identities for digital personas in customer onboarding processes. Also, verifying the authenticity of content for real-time communication channels, including social media platforms.
3. Narrative intelligence. These platforms are becoming critical to strategic security, communications and risk management, enabling organizations to detect, track and manage adversarial information campaigns, activist investors or other emerging reputational threats.
Prevalent use cases: Identifying and tracking campaigns in real time, discovering emerging reputational threats, understanding the narrative landscape and assessing geopolitical or market risk.
Measure outcomes, not activity, when prioritizing disinformation security investments
The CFO must evaluate spending by the impact it has on underlying financial and enterprise risk. This approach enables CFOs, in partnership with their C-suites, to:
- Assess current reputation management capabilities and the supporting tech stack’s ability to detect and analyze the evolution and flow of narratives, classify attacks by adversarial intent and track the spread of propagators with telemetry and mapping features.
- Select and fund disinformation security tools to modernize reputation intelligence and prioritize required funding, based on measured protection level outcomes, thus allowing the CFO to operationalize risk appetite, balancing protection levels with cost.
- Work with the C-suite to develop and implement TrustOps — a holistic strategic governance that enables the necessary board-level oversight of related risks, impacts and mitigants.
Three levers for execution
1. The CFO must reinforce a culture of shared responsibility, underscored with consistent messaging that aligns mitigated disinformation risks with the ethical use of the tools, organization values and strategic priorities.
2. The CFO and their C-suite must negotiate robust protection-level agreements and update contracts that minimize business friction, optimize for management’s risk appetite and enable compliance with evolving statutory and regulatory requirements. That is in addition to holding the vendors responsible when failing to meet expectations, with metrics that track protection-level outcomes.
3. The CFO must create the playbooks to enable rapid identification, reporting on or responses to material disinformation events. This demands embedding cross-functional workflows and robust guardrails into current governance structures, thereby ensuring regulatory compliance, enforcing strict controls and preventing internal tool misuse.
Pitfalls to avoid
- Attempting use-case scoping in silos, leveraging the collective expertise of the C-suite and possibly external advisers, is essential to maximizing benefits.
- Avoiding “security through awareness” alone. Employee training is insufficient against hyper-realistic deepfakes or adversarial (unethical) subversions of the tools. Instead, hardened business processes and technical controls are required to ensure effectiveness and public safety, with a focus on delivered protection-level outcomes, rather than the details of implementation.
- Preventing the self-sabotage that results from over-engineered governance or misaligned materiality thresholds, which trigger constant crisis loops when too low, or alternatively, deem the tools inconsequential when too high. Organizations must find the right balance between agility and the need to establish controlled, cohesive, reliable and repeatable processes to hold all stakeholders accountable for business benefits and ethical use.
