Your company is under attack. You just don’t know it yet.
Some colleagues of mine in France just dropped a document that landed on my desk like a cold shower. If you sit in a C-suite, serve on a board, or carry the word “risk” anywhere in your title, read it. Doesn’t matter where you operate.
VIGINUM (France’s national service dedicated to detecting foreign digital interference) teamed up with the CDSE (the club that brings together corporate security directors from France’s largest companies) to publish their Guide de sensibilisation à la menace informationnelle.
In plain English: a field guide on how nation-states and hostile actors are weaponizing information, not against governments, not during elections but against private companies. Yours. Mine. The ones we advise.
This isn’t academic speculation. These are documented cases VIGINUM observed firsthand.
Let me walk you through what they found. Coordinated bot armies launched hashtag campaigns to fabricate boycotts against a major French retailer, imply because it kept its stores open in Russia. Not a consumer revolt. A manufactured one.
A pro-Russian association organized protests outside the facilities of a French industrial group. The images were amplified by foreign-linked channels. Then Russia’s own state propaganda machine picked it up to undermine France’s support for Ukraine. The company was just the vehicle.
In Africa, false narratives about a French energy company were seeded on no-name YouTube channels, then laundered through paid-article media outlets, then redistributed across foreign digital networks until the lie looked like news.
A deepfake video built from a real French broadcast was doctored to suggest a pharmaceutical group’s acquisition served a foreign politician’s personal interests. It spread across Telegram and affiliated channels before anyone could blink.
And one that should terrify every CFO: someone created a mirror copy of a company’s website, published fake press releases about financial results, and an actual news agency picked them up. The stock tanked. The perpetrators were never identified.
The damage runs three layers deep. Reputation, gone in hours, rebuilt over years. Economics, lost contracts, scared investors, broken partnerships, stock crashes. And something most people don’t talk about: internal destabilization. When your own employees start doubting the company’s values and integrity because of a manufactured narrative, you’ve got a cohesion crisis no HR playbook was designed to handle.
Pierre Tramier from the CDSE nailed it when he said the enterprise is now a target not just for what it does, but for what it is. Its origin. Its values. Its culture. What it represents on the global stage.
Read that again. Your company isn’t attacked because of a bad quarter or a product recall. It’s attacked because of what it symbolizes.
This is exactly why I’ve spent the last two years building what I call CRO 3.0 (Chief Risk Officer 3.0). Here’s the honest truth: the traditional Chief Risk Officer mandate was built for a world of financial risk, operational risk, and compliance checklists. It was never designed, never even imagined, to handle information warfare, narrative manipulation, or a foreign government deciding your brand is a useful proxy target.
The CRO 3.0 puts informational threat intelligence at the heart of enterprise risk governance. Not as an appendix. Not as a line item in the communications department’s crisis binder. At the core, alongside financial, cyber, and operational risk.
Reputation. Narrative control. Information sovereignty. These are strategic assets. Treat them like it.
What the VIGINUM/CDSE guide recommends is anticipation, organizational adaptation, awareness from the boardroom to the shop floor. That’s the CRO 3.0 playbook I’ve been writing. Seeing it validated by a national intelligence service isn’t satisfying. It’s urgent.
If your risk framework doesn’t include an informational threat layer today, you’re running a 2025 company with a 2010 risk model. And somewhere, someone is already drafting the narrative that will test you.
The guide is available through the CDSE. Download it. Print it. Put it on your board’s next agenda.
And if you want to talk about how CRO 3.0 works in practice — I’m one message away.
Benoit
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