IOC Fatigue Is Over: Why CISOs Must Think in Campaigns, Not Emails

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-30

If you're a CISO, you know the drill. Your inbox floods with alerts. Each one screams for attention. You chase down indicators of compromise—those little digital fingerprints—one by one. It's exhausting. And honestly, it's not working anymore. That's the core message from Cofense, a company that knows a thing or two about phishing. Their argument? Stop treating every email as a standalone threat. Start thinking in campaigns. This shift isn't just a nice-to-have; it's becoming a survival skill for security teams drowning in noise. ### The Real Problem With Single Alerts Here's the thing about chasing individual IOCs: it's reactive by design. You see a suspicious link, you block it. Another email slips through, you quarantine it. But phishing doesn't work that way. Attackers run coordinated campaigns. They send hundreds of variations, tweak their payloads, and rotate infrastructure. By the time you've dealt with one email, three more have landed. This approach creates what security folks call "alert fatigue." Analysts get numb. They start ignoring low-priority warnings. And that's exactly when the big one slips through. It's not a skills problem—it's a design problem. You're asking your team to fight a war one bullet at a time. ### Shifting to a Campaign Mindset Think of it like this: a phishing campaign is a wave, not a single drop. When you view threats as campaigns, you start looking at patterns. You ask different questions. Not "what does this link do?" but "what is the attacker trying to achieve across these fifty messages?" That perspective changes everything. You can spot the same lure being reused. You notice when a new domain pops up that mirrors an old one. You see the timing—why are these emails hitting at 3 AM? A campaign view gives you context, and context is power. ### Better Visibility, Faster Response Cofense argues that campaign-based detection gives CISOs a clearer picture of the threat landscape. Instead of a messy pile of individual incidents, you get a map. You see how attacks cluster. You understand which departments are being targeted and why. That visibility lets you prioritize with confidence. Response times improve too. When you recognize a campaign early, you can shut down its infrastructure before it spreads. You're not playing whack-a-mole anymore. You're cutting off the head of the snake. ### Reducing Analyst Burnout Let's talk about your team. Analysts are drowning in false positives. They spend hours triaging emails that turn out to be harmless. That's not just inefficient—it's demoralizing. Campaign-based thinking reduces that noise. Instead of investigating each email, they can focus on the bigger picture. It's more engaging work, and it feels like making a real difference. One CISO I spoke with put it bluntly: "We stopped counting emails and started mapping attacks. Our team actually sleeps now." That's the goal, right? A security team that isn't running on fumes is a team that catches real threats. ### Practical Steps to Get Started Making the switch doesn't require a complete overhaul. Start small. Group alerts by sender domain, subject line patterns, or attachment types. Look for clusters. Use tools that aggregate phishing data across your environment. And most importantly, train your analysts to ask "what's the campaign here?" instead of "what's this email?" It's not about throwing away your existing tools. It's about changing how you interpret what they tell you. The data is already there. You just need to see it differently. ### The Bottom Line Phishing isn't going away. But the way you respond to it can evolve. Campaign-based detection isn't a magic bullet, but it's a massive step forward. It gives you clarity, speed, and a team that isn't burnt out. And in today's threat landscape, that's worth more than any single IOC. So take a step back. Look at the patterns. Think in campaigns, not emails. Your analysts will thank you, and so will your board when you explain how you stopped an attack before it became a headline. *This article was originally published on The European Magazine.*