The Art of News Hijacking: Cybersecurity Focus
For any public relations campaign, jumping on the back of the latest news is crucial in order for businesses to appear as experts in their field who are fully in tune with the latest industry changes and issues. We have previously discussed this in a recent blog around ‘Proactive and Reactive Content,’ and ‘How to perfect the delicate art of News Hijacking’. But how can we do this for specific verticals, such as cybersecurity?
The Evolving Security Space
News hijacking has been particularly prevalent in the cybersecurity industry, as the number of cyber attacks continues to increase, especially during COVID-19. News around the latest high profile data breaches seem to be a regular occurrence, and often makes national headlines.
These breaking news stories provide a valuable opportunity to get our clients’ views in front of the media and a major part of interesting debate and conversations. By understanding our clients’ messaging, we can comment around why a particular breach might have happened, advice on what other businesses need to implement to prevent such an incident, and where the responsibility lies.
For two of our clients in the cybersecurity space, VIPRE and Certes, we have made thought leadership and news hijacking a core part of the PR strategy by capitalising on the latest news – in turn, receiving some excellent coverage from Tier A publications.
VIPRE – Reactive Content
Two recent cybersecurity incidents include the West Midlands phishing test, and a statement from Facebook around normalising data leaks; both which led to the creation of thought provoking media comments and feature opportunities for VIPRE.
In response to the Facebook statement, Neo PR took a personal and opinionated approach to VIPRE’s response, explaining how worrying Facebook’s view is to normalise data leaks. However, without a solution, there’s no point in providing a good response! See what VIPRE suggests below:
Businesses of all sizes have a responsibility to keep data secure. In order to do this, businesses need to place cybersecurity as a priority throughout their processes and invest in the right tools and training to make this more of a business-critical solution, and less of an ‘emerging necessity’ as it is now.
Similarly, the West Midlands train service tested its employees with a phishing link, pretending to offer them a bonus for their hard work over COVID-19. Providing an alternative and interesting opinion helps to attract the readers eye, and in this case, however unethical the incentive behind the test may have been, VIPRE highlighted that the fact that employees clicked on the link at all highlights the need for businesses to perform these types of tests in the first place. Employees need continuous training to identify and avoid these attacks to protect both the business and themselves.
Check out the coverage for the West Midlands article here at Top Business Tech, and the Facebook comment here within a Sillicon feature!
Certes – Utilising the News Agenda
Additionally, the latest thought leadership articles as part of Certes’ campaign focuses on Zero Trust, distributed workforces, and specifically references a recent BBC news article about out of date and unsecure routers. By using the news agenda, we can ensure that the content we pitch out is relevant to existing security issues. See what Certes had to say about Zero Trust:
The Zero Trust concept should be a fundamental component of any business’ security posture, but it is particularly relevant today with distributed workforces which have extended the corporate network into people’s homes at a huge scale.
However, rather than think about securing the network from the end-point inwards and rely on a distributed workforce to maintain a Zero Trust end-point security policy, organisations need to invert the problem and address data security from the core out. By separating data security from the network and adopting a data security overlay, you can mitigate the risk associated with a distributed workforce, because the concept of Trust becomes completely disassociated with physical presence or location.
Are you in the cybersecurity industry and want to benefit from working with a PR team that keeps constant tabs on your ever changing industry, and can use the skills and knowledge to craft the perfect response? Get in touch with us at prworks@neopr.co.uk
