Summary

Cyberbullying targeting brands increased by 205% in France in 2025, according to Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr. This is no longer a marginal risk, but a fully-fledged operational threat, ranging from coordinated digital raids to deepfakes, review bombing, and brand identity theft. Companies that weather these crises without lasting damage share three characteristics: they built a solid online reputation before any attack occurred, they have a response protocol that can be activated within 24 hours, and they treat each incident as a trust-building opportunity rather than a humiliation to be suppressed.

Brand Cyberbullying Has Changed Its Face: Mapping New Forms of Attack

Equating brand cyberbullying with a few negative Google reviews is a radical underestimation of the reality in 2026. In the professional sphere, coordinated campaigns of intimidation, insults, or fraudulent negative reviews can seriously damage the reputation of organisations that are often ill-equipped to respond, from artisans to non-profits. Yet attack methods have become considerably more industrialised and diversified, to the point that analysts at Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr describe these coordinated campaigns as “digital terrorism that activates a range of different cyber threats to harm the organisation.”

Digital Raids and Review Bombing: The Crowd as a Weapon

A digital raid (or “review bombing”) involves mobilising a community (often around an emotional trigger) to flood a company’s review platforms with negative ratings en masse and within a very short timeframe. Suffering a review bombing has immediate consequences on brand image, but the impact can go far beyond a temporary drop in an online rating. If not managed quickly, such a crisis undermines the trust of existing customers and severely hampers the acquisition of new prospects. The case of the bakery in Oise in 2025 perfectly illustrates the disproportion between trigger and consequence: a TikTok content creator aggressively accused the bakery on camera of getting her order wrong, triggering a torrent of devastating reviews. This type of attack draws its power from the emotional virality of social platforms: the algorithm amplifies controversial content, and the brand finds itself fighting not only the harassers but also the intrinsic mechanics of social media.

Brand Identity Theft and Deepfakes: When the Fake Becomes Indistinguishable

Identity theft represents a threat of a higher order, as it transforms the brand itself into a vector of attack. 52% of brands reported experiencing a cyberattack related to social media in 2024, and the average cost of recovery following an account takeover exceeds $4.6 million per incident. In October 2025, Disney’s official Instagram and Facebook accounts were compromised by an unknown group who used the brand’s verified pages to promote a fake cryptocurrency, directly exploiting the trust of millions of followers. Deepfakes have enabled cybercriminals to replicate a brand’s tone, writing style, and message structure, making fraudulent communications practically indistinguishable from legitimate ones.

Coordinated Smear Campaigns: Disinformation in the Service of Unfair Competition

Between spontaneous raids and technical impersonation lies a colder and more enduring form of attack: the organised smear campaign. It involves fake profiles, methodically published defamatory content, and sometimes complicity within closed forums or groups. Brand monitoring makes it possible to map the actors involved, analyse distribution dynamics, and anticipate the next stages of the crisis. Combined with moderation, it becomes a strategic tool for protecting online reputation.

Building a Reputational Shield Before a Crisis: The Preventive Strategy Brands Overlook

The vast majority of companies that fall victim to cyberbullying share one common trait: they did not anticipate it. Their digital presence was either non-existent or unconsolidated, leaving a void that attackers were quick to fill. Digital voids invite third-party content. Prevention is therefore not a defensive option: it is the first line of attack.

Occupying the Digital Space to Make It Impregnable

A brand whose top Google search results are solid, diverse, and positive holds a considerable structural advantage in the face of an attack. The principle is that of “buffer content”: authentic reviews, in-depth articles, press mentions, and proprietary content form a natural barrier that pushes harmful content towards the following pages of the SERP. In remediation mode, specialist agencies intervene on SERP reconquest, positive content pushing, and defensive netlinking to suppress negative results. But building this asset proactively costs ten times less than rebuilding it after a crisis.

The strategy involves, concretely:

• Claiming all profiles on key platforms (Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, LinkedIn, sector directories)
• Regular, SEO-optimised editorial production
• Systematic activation of satisfied customers to generate authentic reviews

Implementing a Real-Time Strategic Monitoring System

Early detection is the factor that makes the difference between an incident contained within 48 hours and a viral crisis lasting weeks. Monitoring enables weak signals to be detected before they go viral. An effective monitoring system for a brand comprises several layers: tracking brand mentions on social media (Mention, Brand24, Hootsuite Insights), monitoring reviews across all relevant platforms, Google Alerts on the brand name and its executives, and detection of similar domain names that could be used for phishing or impersonation. AI-driven brand radar tools now make it possible to monitor mentions and sentiment across LLMs, social networks, and search engines to detect synthetic threats at an early stage. For mid-sized brands, investment in these tools has become as fundamental as public liability insurance – and often less costly.

Training Teams to Recognise and Document Attacks

Human reactions during an attack are often the weakest link in the defensive chain. Social media and customer service teams are on the front line, receiving hostile messages first and may respond emotionally, inadvertently amplifying the crisis. Brands must now establish clear protocols for investigating and responding to digital impersonation and synthetic harassment, and train HR, legal, and IT teams to recognise and respond to deepfake incidents. Meticulous documentation of each attack – timestamped screenshots, URLs, profiles involved – also forms the indispensable foundation for any subsequent legal recourse. This digital evidence approach follows precise rules: screenshots must include the date, time, and full URL, and be saved to a secure external medium.

Responding to an Ongoing Attack: The Crisis Protocol That Protects Without Escalating

Once an attack is underway, every minute counts and every public reaction can either extinguish the fire or fuel it. Crisis management in the context of cyberbullying follows a counter-intuitive logic: controlled transparency protects better than silence, and a calibrated response neutralises better than a counter-attack.

The First 24 Hours: Triage, Documentation, and Crisis Cell Activation

The first mistake brands under attack make is responding individually to every negative comment, which signals high activity to the algorithms and amplifies the visibility of hostile content. The brand may choose to respond to reviews by explaining that it is currently the target of a smear campaign and invite customers to verify that the reviews are false, potentially turning the situation into a positive communication opportunity. The first-24-hour protocol must be pre-established and activable without deliberation: identify the nature and origin of the attack (spontaneous raid, coordinated campaign, malicious competitor), map the affected platforms, document evidence, activate official reports, and prepare a single, centralised communication. PHAROS is used to report unlawful public content to the relevant specialist services, while a formal complaint initiates an investigation into the perpetrator when the company is a victim. The two steps are complementary and not mutually exclusive.

Legal and Platform Recourse: Report, Remove, Prosecute

The French legal framework offers real recourse, provided the steps are taken in the right order. Police officers and gendarmes assigned to the PHAROS platform verify that reported content and behaviour constitute a breach of French law. Their mission is to process reports and alert the relevant services, including the National Police, the Gendarmerie Nationale, and the DGCCRF. An investigation is then opened under the authority of the Public Prosecutor. In parallel, each major platform has reporting procedures for abusive content or fake reviews: Google Business Profile allows users to contest reviews violating its policies, Meta has a reporting form for impersonating accounts, and Trustpilot offers a specific procedure for fraudulent reviews. The European Digital Services Act (DSA) has established trusted flaggers recognised by authorities, who have privileged access for faster removal of unlawful content. On the civil side, defamation and commercial denigration are prosecutable offences, provided evidence is robustly compiled – hence the importance of systematic documentation from the very start of the attack.

Turning a Crisis into Trust Capital: Post-Crisis Communication

The most strategically under-exploited phase is the one that follows the crisis. Brands that merely “survive” miss a consolidation opportunity. A well-managed post-crisis communication strategy, transparently describing how the brand identified the attack, how it responded, and what measures it has taken to protect its customers, generates greater trust capital than existed before the crisis. Employee ambassador strategies and partnerships with micro-influencers can amplify authentic voices, making it harder for fraudsters to mislead. This approach turns the community into an active brand defender, an asset that cannot be bought and that makes future attacks structurally less effective. Brands that communicate openly about incidents they have experienced paradoxically reinforce their credibility: they demonstrate a digital maturity that their silent competitors cannot claim.

Brand cyberbullying is no longer a residual risk that can be ignored in the hope of never falling victim to it. Faced with a threat growing at 205% year-on-year and playing out over hours rather than weeks, the question for brands is no longer whether they will one day be targeted, but whether they will be ready when it happens. This is precisely the positioning of Netino, France’s first Marketing Process Outsourcer and a PHAROS partner (among others), whose operational model addresses each of these requirements point by point. Where a fragmented approach simply juxtaposes a monitoring tool, a community management agency, and a moderation provider that never communicate with one another, Netino integrates the entire brand protection chain under a single governance framework: social listening and weak-signal detection, 24/7 content moderation across all key platforms, crisis community management, and multilingual social care. Our hybrid technology (combining proprietary AI and expert human supervision) handles the massive volumes generated by a coordinated attack, where pure automation reaches its limits when faced with the contextual, cultural, or legal nuances of contentious content.

Netino guarantees immediate scalability with continuous coverage and redundancy protocols activatable without delay, as well as real-time monitoring with alert escalation and continuous improvement loops. With more than 200 client companies (including L’Oréal, Air France, Société Générale, and Castorama) and over 20 years of experience, Netino does not merely advise: it operates. A distinction that, in today’s digital environment, makes all the difference.

Sources

• Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr, Activity Report 2024, published April 2025
• Francenum.gouv.fr, Businesses facing a sharply accelerating cyber threat in 2025, April 2026
• Journal du Net, Negative reviews, blackmail, digital raids: cyberbullying, the new scourge of SMEs and micro-businesses, January 2026
• Influencer Marketing Hub, Social Media Security in 2026, December 2025
• Cyble, Brand Impersonation 2025: Major Threats And What’s Coming 2026, March 2026
• Littler, Deepfakes and Digital Harassment: What Employers Need to Know in 2025
• Bolster.ai, 12 Brand Protection Strategies for 2026, February 2026
• Ministère de l’Intérieur / Police Nationale, PHAROS: reporting unlawful online content
• Economie.gouv.fr, Combating unlawful content: which official channels to use for reporting?, August 2025