If your tools say a link is clean, do you fully trust it?
Most SOC leaders don’t anymore, and for good reason. Phishing has become polished, quiet, and built to blend into everyday traffic.
It slips through filters, lands in inboxes unnoticed, and only reveals its intent after a user interacts. By the time the real behavior appears, your defenses have already stepped aside.
That’s the visibility gap attackers are exploiting every day.
Here’s how your team can close that gap and finally see what those “clean” links are really doing.
Why Phishing Is Harder to Detect Than Ever
Phishing rarely looks suspicious anymore. It blends into normal traffic and hides the real danger until the very last moment, long after most tools stop analyzing.
Here’s the new phishing reality we’re living in:
- It looks clean at first glance: Pages and emails now copy real services almost perfectly.
- The bad part appears late: Harmful behavior triggers only after clicks or form inputs.
- QR codes bypass filters: Scanners often can’t read what’s behind the code, so threats enter unnoticed.
- Redirect chains hide the final payload: Each hop looks harmless, while the real page sits at the end.
- Domains rotate constantly: Short-lived infrastructure makes blocklists easy to evade.
The Fix: See the Full Phishing Attack, Not the Safe-Looking First Step
Many SOC teams have already shifted to advanced behavioral tools, especially interactive sandboxes, because they reveal the parts of phishing attacks that traditional controls never reach.
Instead of stopping at the first “clean” page, the sandbox follows the entire chain and shows the real behavior in minutes.
For example, ANY.RUN’s sandbox can expose 90% of full phishing chains in under 60 seconds, even when the attack hides or uses rediraction as evasion technique.
Check real-world example: phishing attack with rediraction techniques
Fake phishing login page exposed inside ANY.RUN sandbox in 1 min
A recent case showed attackers using ClickUp as the entry point, then quietly redirecting victims through legitimate Microsoft microdomains and finally to an Azure-hosted fake login page.
Inside the sandbox, the whole sequence unfolded automatically in 1 minute, including the redirects and credential-harvesting actions.
Get clear, real-time visibility into phishing attacks your tools currently miss, and see how your team can investigate faster -> Talk to ANY.RUN experts
The Secret of the Fix: Interactivity + Automation
Most security tools fail to expose modern phishing for one simple reason:
they can automate, or they can imitate a human, but they can’t do both at the same time.
That’s exactly the combination today’s evasive attacks are built to defeat.
Phishing kits now rely heavily on human-only actions, clicking through pages, solving CAPTCHA gates, opening links from QR codes, triggering behavior with mouse movement, steps that static scanners and automated crawlers never perform.
Automation alone stops too early.
Manual analysis alone is too slow.
The real breakthrough comes from combining both.
That’s why solutions built on interactive automation have become essential for SOC teams. For instance, ANY.RUN’s interactive sandbox gives analysts the best of both worlds:
- Automation handles the repetitive tasks:
It follows redirects, extracts and opens hidden links from QR codes, launches the right browser, and solves CAPTCHA gates automatically.
- Interactivity gives analysts control:
They can pause the run, follow suspicious paths, click through pages, or trigger actions whenever needed.
ANY.RUN identified the link hidden in the QR
This combination delivers something most tools can’t: full visibility into the entire phishing chain.
It reveals attacks that hide their payload several steps deep, rely on human behavior, or change depending on who’s visiting. And it does it fast enough for analysts to make confident decisions without wasting hours recreating the flow.
The Results SOC Leaders Are Already Seeing
Teams that added an interactive sandbox into their workflow are seeing measurable improvements across their entire response process.
SOC leaders report:
- Up to 58% more threats identified overall, including attacks that bypassed other tools.
- 94% of users experience faster triage, thanks to clear behavioral reports and instant IOCs.
- Up to 20% lower workload for Tier 1, as automation handles the tedious steps.
- 30% fewer escalations from Tier 1 to Tier 2, because junior analysts can resolve more cases with richer context.
- 95% of SOC teams speed up investigations, supported by collaboration tools and shared behavioral visibility.
Talk to ANY.RUN experts to see how an interactive sandbox can strengthen your team’s detection, investigation speed, and response workflow.
Free Webinar: SOC Leader’s Playbook – 3 Steps to Faster MTTR
If you want a deeper, practical look at how top SOCs accelerate detection and response, ANY.RUN is hosting a one-hour session titled “SOC Leader’s Playbook: 3 Steps to Faster MTTR” on 25 November 2025 at 16:00 CET.
In this session, experts will break down how leading teams:
- Cut MTTR by 21 minutes per incident
- Detect new threats earlier with intelligence from 15,000 organizations
- Achieve a 3× performance boost by reducing false positives
Save your seat now to get a clear, proven playbook for speeding up your SOC’s response.
