How to Find a CISO's Email Address (2026)

The fastest way to find a CISO's email is to look it up in a contact database, not to guess it. Search by company domain and title, enrich the person, then read the email status before you send. This guide does that against LeadOcean with curl and spends 4 records.

Examples use placeholders (Acme, acme.com, Jane Doe). Swap in your own domain.

TL;DR

• CISO emails come from three places: a database lookup, a pattern guess at the company domain, or a role inbox such as security@. Only the database gives you a deliverability status.
• Look up by domain and title, enrich with reveal_email, and send only to verified or catch_all_valid addresses.
• Takes about 10 minutes and spends 4 of the 1,000 free records. Sizing the audience by region first costs nothing.

Prerequisites

• A LeadOcean account. The free plan gives 1,000 records one-off, no card: register here.
• An API key from the app, exported as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY.
• curl and jq.

export LEADOCEAN_API_KEY="paste-your-key-here"

Every request goes to https://api.leadocean.io with the header x-api-key. A free key has both scopes, search and enrich.

Step 1: Size the CISO list by region

Send count=true and limit=1 as query parameters and the call returns a total without spending a record. Filters go in a flat JSON body, and every filter is an array of strings.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true&limit=1" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": ["Chief Information Security Officer", "CISO"],
    "jobLevel": ["C-Team"],
    "salesRegion": ["NORAM"]
  }' | jq '.meta'

meta.total is capped at 100,000. If meta.totalIsExact is false, the total is a floor. Enum values are exact strings: C-Team works, c-level returns nothing. The regions are NORAM, LATAM, EMEA and APAC. The counts per region are in "What you get" below.

Step 2: Search for the CISO at one company

Add the company's domain to find the CISO at that account. Each person returned costs one record, so keep limit small.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "domain": ["acme.com"],
    "title": ["Chief Information Security Officer", "CISO"],
    "limit": 3
  }' > ciso.json

jq '.data | length' ciso.json

Title values are keywords. Wrap one in square brackets, such as ["[CISO]"], for an exact match. Search rows are thin: they carry has_email and has_phone flags, not the address itself.

Many companies have no one titled CISO. The role often sits under "Head of Information Security", "VP Security" or "Director of Security". Add those titles to the array when the first search comes back empty, and read the titles before you pick a person.

Step 3: Enrich the person to get the email

Each search row carries an id at meta.source_ids.person_id. Send it back to enrich that exact person. Enrich takes exactly one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id.

PID=$(jq -r '.data[0].meta.source_ids.person_id' ciso.json)

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"person_id\": \"$PID\", \"reveal_email\": true}" > person.json

This costs one record. reveal_email costs nothing extra and returns every email we hold for that person. If we hold nothing, you get a 404 and no charge. There is no lookup by name plus domain: search first, then enrich by person_id.

Step 4: Verify before you send

Read email_status and send only to addresses worth sending to. A verified or catch_all_valid status is safe. A catch_all status means the domain accepts everything, so the mailbox may not exist.

jq -r '.data.contact_data.contact_emails[]
  | select(.status == "verified" or .status == "catch_all_valid")
  | .email' person.json

Bounced emails are not refunded, so treat every other status as a no-send. The full list of statuses is verified, catch_all_valid, catch_all, risky, unknown, untested, invalid, role, disposable, spam_trap, abuse, derived and none.

Security teams often run strict mail filtering. Skip anything that is not clearly valid.

Step 5: Use a pattern only when the lookup finds nothing

When a CISO is not in the data, guess at the company domain, then verify the guess before you send. Four patterns cover most corporate mail setups:

first.last@acme.com    jane.doe@acme.com
flast@acme.com         jdoe@acme.com
first@acme.com         jane@acme.com
firstl@acme.com        janed@acme.com

Find a pattern from any other address you already hold at that domain, then apply it to the CISO's name. Never send to a guessed address that has not been verified. A guess at a catch-all domain always looks valid and tells you nothing.

A role address such as security@ or infosec@ reaches a team, not the CISO, and carries the role status. Skip it. Keep the first email short, name one security problem the CISO owns, and ask one question.

Step 6: Pull the whole list as a CSV

For a list rather than one person, start an export. POST /v1/exports takes up to 50,000 rows a request and 500,000 a day. Each row costs one record. Bulk CSV export is not on Free: it is included on Solo ($97 a month) and Agency ($497 a month).

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/exports" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "cisos-emea",
    "filters": {
      "title": ["Chief Information Security Officer", "CISO"],
      "jobLevel": ["C-Team"],
      "salesRegion": ["EMEA"]
    },
    "limit": 1000,
    "preset": "full"
  }'

Poll GET /v1/exports/{id}, then download from GET /v1/exports/{id}/download. The app's Exports page does the same with a filter builder, a column picker and the record price before you start. It needs no code.

What you get

The Step 1 count is free. The free MCP tool leadocean_count_leads ran these filters on 2026-10-01: title keywords Chief Information Security Officer and CISO, jobLevel C-Team, split by salesRegion. It counts people with a verified, catch_all_valid or catch_all email by default, so these are mailable counts.

The four regions sum to less than the worldwide figure because some people carry no region. Each call returned totalIsExact: true and credits: 0. In the worldwide count, 6,569 of the people are in the US, followed by India (465) and the United Kingdom (437). Title keywords match any title containing those words, so read a sample before you build a campaign on the total.

A record-level response has the shape below (response shape from the API reference, placeholder values):

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "profile_data": { "name": "Jane Doe", "title": "Chief Information Security Officer", "company": "Acme" },
    "contact_data": {
      "has_email": true,
      "email_status": "verified",
      "contact_emails": [
        { "email": "jane.doe@acme.com", "type": "work", "status": "verified" }
      ]
    }
  },
  "meta": { "source": "leadocean" }
}

Each record carries its own fetched_at date, and the dataset refreshes monthly. Check the date on anything you plan to act on.

Troubleshooting

FAQ