This article is a guest post by Dymah Paige, Director Analyst in Gartner's Finance practice, and the views expressed are solely those of the author.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (collectively referred to as "false information" below) from a reputational concern into a major financial and enterprise risk for public and private sectors globally. According to theGartner Emerging Risks Report for Q1 2026, information integrity has become the top emerging risk threatening corporate reputation and profits.

Despite this, fewer than half of executives have established mechanisms to address false information. This is not surprising, stemming from fragmented risk planning and ambiguous ownership of the independent discipline of false information security—which intersects with cybersecurity but is not a subset of it.

Why this risk is currently high on the CFO agenda

CFOs bear personal responsibility for driving business resilience and ensuring compliance, placing them at the core of enterprise strategy coordination. CFOs must align C-suite executives—including the CISO, CIO, CCO, CRO, General Counsel, and/or CMO—to assess organizational gaps in false information defense and fund the construction of a unified false information security system that encompasses three capabilities: identity impersonation protection, content authenticity verification, and narrative intelligence analysis.

CFOs who fail to deploy these tools ethically and reliably are effectively ceding control of the enterprise's mission, values, and valuation to bot-driven attack campaigns or external/internal malicious actors.

This urgency intensified on March 6, when theWhite House released the President Trump's U.S. Cyber Strategy, encouraging the private sector to deploy defensive and offensive cyber operations to detect and defeat adversaries before they breach networks. The strategy also aims to streamline incident reporting processes under the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022.

The latest cybersecurity-related executive order—Executive Order 14390, Combating Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against U.S. Citizens—further reinforces these requirements, calling on the private sector to help identify adversary networks, tactics, and techniques.

These documents are expected to be followed by additional executive actions and possible congressional legislation; if relevant bills pass, many of these strategies will be codified into law.

The three core elements of false information security

Gartner identifies three major categories of false information security tools:

1. Identity impersonation protection.These technologies are moving beyond traditional anti-phishing measures to address sophisticated AI-driven identity attacks targeting brands, executives, and customers.

Common use case: brand protection—detecting and takedown of counterfeit websites and fraudulent social media profiles, threats further exacerbated by AI-driven decoys.

2. Content authenticity verification.These solutions defend against AI-generated video, image, and audio content by verifying the integrity and provenance of digital media.

Common use case: detecting deepfakes to prevent the creation of fraudulent digital personas using synthetic identities during customer onboarding; also verifying the authenticity of content across real-time communication channels, including social media platforms.

3. Narrative intelligence analysis.These platforms are becoming key tools for strategic security, communications, and risk management, enabling organizations to detect, track, and manage adversarial information campaigns, activist investors, or other emerging reputational threats.

Common use case: real-time identification and tracking of information campaigns, surfacing emerging reputational threats, understanding the narrative landscape, and assessing geopolitical or market risks.

Investing in false information security: measuring outcomes, not activity

CFOs must evaluate investments based on their impact on potential financial and enterprise risks. This approach enables CFOs to collaborate with the C-suite to achieve the following objectives:

  • Assess whether current reputation management capabilities and supporting technology stacks can detect and analyze the evolution and flow of narratives, classify attacks by adversarial intent, and track the diffusion paths of propagators through telemetry and mapping capabilities.
  • Select and fund false information security tools to modernize the reputation intelligence system; prioritize funding based on measurable protection level outcomes, enabling CFOs to translate risk appetite into concrete operations, balancing protection levels against cost.
  • Collaborate with the C-suite to develop and implement TrustOps—a holistic strategic governance framework that ensures the board provides necessary oversight of related risks, impacts, and mitigation measures.

Three key execution levers

1. CFOs must strengthen a culture of shared responsibility, aligning mitigated false information risks with the ethical use of tools, organizational values, and strategic priorities through consistent messaging.

2. CFOs and their C-suite teams must negotiate robust protection level agreements and update contract terms to minimize business friction, optimize management risk appetite, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations and supervisory requirements. Additionally, when vendors fail to meet expectations, they should be held accountable through metrics tracking protection level outcomes.

3. CFOs must develop contingency plans to quickly identify, report, or respond to significant false information incidents. This requires embedding cross-functional workflows and robust guardrails into existing governance structures to ensure regulatory compliance, enforce strict controls, and prevent internal misuse of tools.

Pitfalls to avoid

  • Avoid defining use cases in silos. Leveraging the collective expertise of the C-suite, and external advisors when necessary, is critical to maximizing benefits.
  • Do not rely solely on "security through awareness training." Against hyper-realistic deepfakes or unethical (adversarial) subversion of tools, employee training is far from sufficient. Instead, strengthen business processes and technical controls to ensure effectiveness and public safety, focusing on delivered protection level outcomes rather than implementation details.
  • Prevent self-sabotage from over-engineered governance or misaligned materiality thresholds—thresholds set too low trigger continuous crisis cycles, while those set too high render tools ineffective. Organizations must find the right balance between agility and establishing controlled, coherent, reliable, and repeatable processes to ensure all stakeholders are accountable for business benefits and ethical use.