Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hasan, Najmul, BusiReddyGari, Prashanth, Zhao, Haitao, Ren, Yihao, Xu, Jinsheng, Zhang, Shaohu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Hasan, Najmul
BusiReddyGari, Prashanth
Zhao, Haitao
Ren, Yihao
Xu, Jinsheng
Zhang, Shaohu
author_facet Hasan, Najmul
BusiReddyGari, Prashanth
Zhao, Haitao
Ren, Yihao
Xu, Jinsheng
Zhang, Shaohu
contents Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require substantial hardening before deployment in email security systems, particularly against coordinated multi-vector attacks that exploit architectural vulnerabilities. This paper proposes LLMPEA, an LLM-based framework to detect phishing email attacks across multiple attack vectors, including prompt injection, text refinement, and multilingual attacks. We evaluate three frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok-3) and comprehensive prompting design to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations against phishing email attacks. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs can detect the phishing email over 90% accuracy while we also highlight that LLM-based phishing email detection systems could be exploited by adversarial attack, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks. Our findings provide critical insights for LLM-based phishing detection in real-world settings where attackers exploit multiple vulnerabilities in combination.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_10104
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models
Hasan, Najmul
BusiReddyGari, Prashanth
Zhao, Haitao
Ren, Yihao
Xu, Jinsheng
Zhang, Shaohu
Cryptography and Security
Information Retrieval
Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require substantial hardening before deployment in email security systems, particularly against coordinated multi-vector attacks that exploit architectural vulnerabilities. This paper proposes LLMPEA, an LLM-based framework to detect phishing email attacks across multiple attack vectors, including prompt injection, text refinement, and multilingual attacks. We evaluate three frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok-3) and comprehensive prompting design to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations against phishing email attacks. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs can detect the phishing email over 90% accuracy while we also highlight that LLM-based phishing email detection systems could be exploited by adversarial attack, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks. Our findings provide critical insights for LLM-based phishing detection in real-world settings where attackers exploit multiple vulnerabilities in combination.
title Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10104