Why CISOs Should Hunt Phishing Campaigns, Not Individual Emails

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-30

If you're a CISO, you probably know the feeling all too well. Your inbox is a flood of alerts, each one screaming for attention. Every suspicious email looks like a potential breach, and your security analysts are drowning in a sea of indicators of compromise, or IOCs. It's exhausting, it's inefficient, and frankly, it's not working as well as it should. That's where the idea of shifting your mindset comes in. Instead of chasing individual malicious emails, what if you started thinking in terms of entire campaigns? It's a subtle shift, but it can completely change how you detect threats, respond to incidents, and protect your organization. ### The Problem with the Old Way of Thinking For years, the default approach to phishing defense has been reactive. You find a bad email, you block it, you move on. But here's the thing: attackers don't operate in a vacuum. They launch coordinated campaigns, often targeting hundreds or thousands of people at once with variations of the same lure. When you focus on single emails, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. You might catch one variant, but the other ninety-nine are still out there, slipping through your filters. This creates what we call IOC fatigue. Your analysts get so bogged down with individual alerts that they start to miss the bigger picture. They're so busy putting out fires that they can't see the forest burning around them. ### Thinking in Campaigns: A New Perspective So, what does campaign-based thinking actually look like in practice? It means grouping related phishing attempts together based on shared characteristics. This could be the sender's infrastructure, the URL patterns, the attachment hashes, or even the specific language used in the message. By clustering these signals, you move from a list of disconnected events to a coherent story. You can see how the attack is evolving, who it's targeting, and what the end goal might be. This isn't just about better detection; it's about better understanding your adversary. ### How Campaign Detection Boosts Visibility When you shift to a campaign mindset, your visibility improves almost immediately. Instead of a chaotic stream of alerts, you get a structured view of active threats. You can see if a campaign is ramping up, if it's targeting a specific department, or if it's using a new evasion technique. This level of insight is invaluable. It allows you to prioritize your response efforts. Instead of treating every alert with the same level of urgency, you can focus on the campaigns that pose the greatest risk to your business. You're no longer just reacting; you're anticipating. ### Accelerating Response and Reducing Fatigue One of the biggest wins here is speed. When you identify a campaign, you can block the entire infrastructure behind it, not just the one email that happened to land in your inbox. This means you're shutting down the attack at its source, which is far more effective than playing whack-a-mole with individual messages. And what about your analysts? Campaign-based detection gives them context. Instead of investigating a random email with no background, they can see the whole attack pattern. This makes their job more interesting and less frustrating. They spend less time on false positives and more time on actual threats. The result is a significant reduction in analyst fatigue and burnout. > "The goal isn't to catch every single email. The goal is to understand the attack and stop it before it spreads." ### Practical Steps for Your Organization If you're ready to make the shift, here are a few things to consider: - **Look for patterns, not just payloads.** Train your team to look for commonalities across different phishing attempts. - **Invest in tools that support correlation.** Your security stack should be able to group related events automatically. - **Share intelligence internally.** Make sure your threat intel is accessible to everyone who needs it, from the SOC to the C-suite. This isn't a silver bullet, but it's a massive step forward. By changing how you think about phishing, you can change how effectively you defend against it. The days of IOC fatigue don't have to be the norm. It's time to start thinking in campaigns, not emails. It's a smarter, faster, and more sustainable way to protect your company, and your people will thank you for it.