How to Stay Calm as a CISO: 8 Serious-ish Tips for the Age of AI Phishing

As a CISO, you’ve probably had enough of the “are we secure?” question. Your board wants the one-word answer, not the four-paragraph reality you’re actually thinking about.

Then there are a compliance calendar that never actually ends, alert fatigue, 3am pages, a budget that grows slower than your attack surface, and the fact that one person clicking one link can undo a year of your work. Now add AI-generated phishing, cloned voices, and deepfake video calls to the pile, and “staying calm” starts to feel like a compliance requirement nobody wrote down.

So here are 8 absolutely serious, and not at all random tips to ensure you don’t go crazy.

1. Make peace with “fully secure” being fictional.

It’s the corporate equivalent of a unicorn: mentioned often in board decks, never once spotted in the wild. Once you stop chasing it, you can chase something achievable, like “meaningfully harder to fool than last quarter.”

2. Delegate your paranoia.

You cannot personally distrust every email, call, and “urgent” invoice, as your brain will eventually explode and let one through out of sheer exhaustion. Outsource the suspicion. Build a system that stays paranoid around the clock so you don’t have to be the last line of defense at 11pm on a Friday (we hope you don’t work these hours though).

3. Schedule your panic. 🗓️

Block 15 minutes on your calendar labeled “Existential Dread.” Panicking on a schedule is, technically, time management. Panicking randomly between meetings is just Tuesday. Write everything down to organize your thoughts. “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” - Charles Kettering.

4. Learn to love the audit. 🦷

Think of it like a dental cleaning: unpleasant, mildly humbling, and considerably better than what happens if you keep avoiding it. NIST and ISO 27001 aren’t punishing you personally (probably).

5. Stop training humans to stop being human.

No amount of “spot the phishing email” training fully overrides curiosity, urgency, and a Monday brain running on two coffees. Assume someone will click. Then the question is whether you know who does.

6. Promote, internally and in your heart, the one coworker who still picks up the phone. 📱

Every organization has that one person who, when something feels off, actually calls to check instead of replying to the thread. They are doing more for your risk posture than half your stack, and they will never get a badge for it. Give them one anyway.

7. Verify out-of-band, even when it feels awkward.

If your CFO calls asking for an urgent wire transfer, hang up and call them back on the number you already had — not the one they just gave you. Yes, it’s mildly insulting to imply your CFO might be a deepfake. Do it anyway. Your CFO will forgive you. An empty bank account will not.

8. Touch grass. 🏕️

Step away from the dashboard. The threats will still be there when you get back — that’s rather the whole problem, and not one more hour of staring at a SIEM is going to fix it alone.

In all seriousness, if you actually want to reduce cognitive load and get something that can help you on a daily basis, check out Brightside AI. This security awareness platform is designed to make CISO’s life at least a tiny bit easier.