Executive Social Media Monitoring’s Role in Digital Executive Protection

One of the most common questions we now get asked is whether or not our Concierge Cybersecurity & Privacy Platform has online reputation management capabilities. Such an inquiry would have been completely unexpected just a few years ago. Traditionally, all facets of reputation management have fallen on the CMO and others within marketing and PR. 

In recent years however, CISOs, CSOs, and those in risk management positions have been inquiring more about reputation management and its role in cybersecurity. The question is primarily driven by security stakeholders attempting to determine if a correlation exists between maintaining the integrity of an executive’s online persona and an organization’s overall cyber risk. 

Reputation management is being used interchangeably with social media monitoring

In its simplest form, reputation management refers to the monitoring and controlling of publicly available information about a person or entity, typically an organization or company. It also commonly refers to any software or services that tracks, monitors, or manages brand, product, or personal perception; and to some extent crisis management. Most of this is not of CISO concern. 

What is potentially relevant to security teams is actually not reputation management; rather its social media monitoring.

Traditionally, social media monitoring has been used to track brand conversations over time. It primarily helps marketing teams find trending conversations, uncover ambassadors, and respond to complaints or criticism before they exacerbate. 

With people’s lives increasingly online, however, executive social media monitoring now has the potential to help organizations discover security threats stemming from fake social media profiles, social media account hijacking, and other anomalous activity taking place on social channels. 

Executive social media hijacking is a cybersecurity risk 

Social media accounts are increasingly being compromised as a prelude to, or as the result of, a cyberattack, online fraud, or identity theft. Just last year, “the Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded over 28,000 complaints related to social media] spoofing with losses totaling approximately $216 million,” according to TODAY.

Such threats are not only of consequence to the impacted executives and their families, but also to the organizations that they lead. For example, an adversary with access to an executive’s social media profile could facilitate social media impersonations and email spoofing to capture sensitive or proprietary information that could subsequently be used to launch a significant attack or data breach against the enterprise. 

Likewise, an attacker could negate an executive’s privacy protections by enabling location tracking; engage in cyberstalking, make reputation damaging comments, and conduct digital and even physical harassment. 

Most of these threats and vulnerabilities are of CISO concern but not yet under CISO’s purview to control. 

Executive social media monitoring can bolster digital executive protection 

There’s no doubt that a brand’s reputation management and social media monitoring should remain under marketing and PR control. But, a strong argument can be made that, because of social media’s increasing influence over cybercrime, the time is now to transition executive social media monitoring away from the CMO and to the CISO. 

However, regardless of each enterprise’s decision, it’s important to remember that social media monitoring alone is just one small (and reactive) piece of the digital executive protection puzzle. Fully protecting executives, and by extension the company, requires a robust and proactive strategy designed to protect one’s personal online privacy, personal devices, and home network security. 

As a pioneer of digital executive protection, BlackCloak helps reduce online privacy and cybersecurity risks to executives in their personal digital lives. To do so, we remove PII from more than 180 data brokers, and constantly scan the deep/dark web for data leaks. In addition, we manually review and suggest changes to both social media and device privacy, security, tracking, and other settings. 

To further ensure digital security and online privacy, we also help our clients limit location tracking to only the applications that absolutely need to know their whereabouts, set them up on the National Do Not Call Registry, ensure operating systems are updated, install and configure a secure web browser and password manager, and establish dual-factor authentication wherever possible. 

Enterprise security can certainly benefit from executive social media monitoring, but realizing the benefits will not come to fruition until such an initiative is part of a more comprehensive digital executive protection strategy. 

For more information on how BlackCloak can help protect your company by protecting your executives, download, Executive Protection at Home is a Major Gap in Cybersecurity. 

The post Executive Social Media Monitoring’s Role in Digital Executive Protection appeared first on BlackCloak | Protect Your Digital Life™.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from BlackCloak | Protect Your Digital Life™ authored by Evan. Read the original post at: https://blackcloak.io/executive-social-media-monitorings-role-in-digital-executive-protection/