Why CISOs Should Hunt Phishing Campaigns, Not Single Emails

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-30

If you're a CISO, you know the drill. Your inbox is a war zone, and every day brings a fresh wave of suspicious emails flagged by your team. Each one gets its own ticket, its own investigation, and its own verdict. It feels productive, right? But here's the uncomfortable truth: that approach is burning out your analysts and leaving real threats undetected. Cofense recently highlighted a smarter way to think about phishing. Instead of treating every email as a one-off incident, they argue you should look at the bigger picture: the campaign. It's a subtle shift in mindset, but it can completely change how your security operations center (SOC) functions. ### The Problem with Single-Email Thinking When you focus on individual emails, you're playing whack-a-mole. An analyst sees a suspicious message, checks the indicators of compromise (IOCs), and either blocks it or lets it through. Then the next email arrives, and the cycle repeats. There's no context, no connection, and no sense of the attacker's broader strategy. This leads to what Cofense calls "IOC fatigue." Your team gets so bogged down in the details of individual emails that they lose sight of the forest for the trees. They're exhausted, and their judgment starts to slip. Critical alerts get ignored because they look like the last hundred false positives. I've seen it happen in real organizations. A friend of mine runs a SOC for a mid-sized financial firm, and he told me his analysts were drowning. They were spending hours on each email, trying to determine if it was malicious or just spam. Morale was low, and turnover was high. Sound familiar? ### Campaigns Give You the Full Picture Here's the thing: attackers don't send one email and call it a day. They launch campaigns. They send thousands of variations of the same lure, tweaking subject lines, sender names, and payloads to evade detection. If you're only looking at individual emails, you'll never see the pattern. By shifting to a campaign-based approach, you start to see the attack as a whole. You can identify the infrastructure behind it, the tactics being used, and the specific groups being targeted. This isn't just about blocking a single email; it's about understanding the adversary and disrupting their entire operation. Cofense's point is simple: when you think in campaigns, you improve visibility. You can spot a new campaign early, before it reaches critical mass. You can also accelerate your response because you're not starting from scratch with every email. You already know the playbook. ### How to Make the Shift in Your SOC Making this change isn't about buying a new tool. It's about changing your team's workflow and mindset. Here are a few practical steps to get you started: - **Group emails by campaign**: Use clustering tools or even simple heuristics to group similar phishing emails together. Look for commonalities in the URL structure, attachment hashes, or email headers. - **Track campaign lifecycles**: Don't just log an email and move on. Follow the campaign over time. When did it start? How is it evolving? When does it end? This gives you a narrative, not just a data point. - **Prioritize by campaign impact**: Not all campaigns are equal. Some are targeting your CFO with fake invoices; others are spraying the whole company with generic malware. Focus your analysts' energy on the ones that matter most. - **Share campaign intel across teams**: Your SOC isn't the only department that benefits. Your threat intelligence, incident response, and even your training teams can use this data to strengthen your defenses. The result? Reduced analyst fatigue. Instead of chasing 100 emails, your team is managing 10 campaigns. That's a much more manageable workload, and it allows them to do deep, meaningful analysis instead of shallow triage. ### The Bottom Line for CISOs Phishing isn't going away. In fact, it's getting more sophisticated every year. But that doesn't mean your team has to suffer. By shifting your focus from emails to campaigns, you can cut through the noise and see the real threats. It's not just about efficiency, either. It's about effectiveness. A tired analyst misses things. A focused analyst catches them. If you want to improve your security posture, start by changing how you think about the problem. So, take a step back. Look at your current phishing response process. Are you treating every email as a unique snowflake? If so, it's time to zoom out and start hunting campaigns. Your analysts will thank you, and your organization will be safer for it.