Technique for Investigating Attacks on a Company's Reputation on a Social Media Platform

In this paper, we present the technique for investigating attacks on a company's reputation on a social media platform as a part of an arsenal of digital forensics investigators. The technique consists of several methods, including (1) identifying the attack based on sentiment analysis, (2) identifying the actors of the attack, (3) determining the attack's impact, and (4) determining core actors to identify the strategy of the attacker, including (4a) usage of bots, (4b) attempts to conflict initiation, (4c) competitor promotion, (4d) uncoordinated user attack. In the paper we also present the evaluation of this technique using the real investigation of use-case, where we investigate the attack on a retail company X, that occurs after the company changed its policy dedicated to COVID-19 QR codes for their visitors.