V-CHIMERA: An Immune-Inspired Verified Framework for Organizational Cyber Crisis Response Under Misinformation.

In organizational cyber crises, incident response and official communication form coupled control loops, yet they are usually engineered separately. We present V-CHIMERA (Verified Coupled Human-Information-Machine Incident Response Architecture), a framework for organizational cyber crisis response under misinformation that jointly models cyber state, belief dynamics, trust, and communication governance. The framework combines three elements: an explicit cyber-social coupling architecture, a runtime protocol shield for communication safety, and immune-gated coupling (IGC) that uses danger signaling, tolerance thresholds, and immune memory to regulate when social feedback should affect operational response and how strongly counter-messaging should be targeted. Across three representative scenarios-ransomware rumor, outage rumor, and exfiltration scam-and eight seeds per scenario, all shielded policies achieved zero executed protocol violations. Relative to naive coupled control, IGC reduced cyber-harm area under the curve (AUC) by 57.6% in ransomware rumor and 42.6% in outage rumor while also reducing misbelief. Results were scenario-dependent rather than uniformly dominant: in exfiltration scam, a broadcast-only ablation outperformed targeted messaging, showing that targeting can fail when diffusion rapidly crosses community boundaries. Sensitivity analysis further shows that IGC attenuates the brittleness observed under strong coupling and weak moderation. The results suggest that biomimetic regulation is valuable not because coupling always helps, but because it prevents overreaction, clarifies when targeting should be used, and yields safer organizational defaults for misinformation-aware incident response.