Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2412.00586

Evaluating Large Language Models' Capability to Launch Fully Automated Spear Phishing Campaigns: Validated on Human Subjects

Fred Heiding·Simon Lermen·Andrew Kao·Bruce Schneier·Arun Vishwanath
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the capability of large language models to conduct personalized phishing attacks and compare their performance with human experts and AI models from last year. We include four email groups with a combined total of 101 participants: A control group of arbitrary phishing emails, which received a click-through rate (recipient pressed a link in the email) of 12%, emails generated by human experts (54% click-through), fully AI-automated emails 54% (click-through), and AI emails utilizing a human-in-the-loop (56% click-through). Thus, the AI-automated attacks performed on par with human experts and 350% better than the control group. The results are a significant improvement from similar studies conducted last year, highlighting the increased deceptive capabilities of AI models. Our AI-automated emails were sent using a custom-built tool that automates the entire spear phishing process, including information gathering and creating personalized vulnerability profiles for each target. The AI-gathered information was accurate and useful in 88% of cases and only produced inaccurate profiles for 4% of the participants. We also use language models to detect the intention of emails. Claude 3.5 Sonnet scored well above 90% with low false-positive rates and detected several seemingly benign emails that passed human detection. Lastly, we analyze the economics of phishing, highlighting how AI enables attackers to target more individuals at lower cost and increase profitability by up to 50 times for larger audiences.

Explore related subjects

cs.CR

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Fred Heiding, Simon Lermen, Andrew Kao, Bruce Schneier, Arun Vishwanath. 2024-11-30. Evaluating Large Language Models' Capability to Launch Fully Automated Spear Phishing Campaigns: Validated on Human Subjects. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00586

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Empirical Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks on NLP Text Classifiers: A Baseline Study on SST-2

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) try to determine whether a specific record was used to train a model, a privacy risk that matters in natural language processing (NLP), where training data can contain sensitive user text. This paper presents a controlled benchmark of membership inference vulnerability for text classification on the GLUE SST-2 sentiment dataset. A TF-IDF + Logistic Regression pipeline and a fine-tuned DistilBERT classifier are compared under a loss-threshold MIA, with utility measured by development accuracy and macro F1. DistilBERT reached 0.9466 accuracy and 0.9460 macro F1 against 0.8756 and 0.8727 for Logistic Regression, yet both models leaked membership signal (Attack AUC 0.5615 and 0.5800, respectively). Two mitigations were tested. Stronger regularization reduced leakage for Logistic Regression at a visible utility cost, whereas fine-tuning DistilBERT for 2 epochs instead of 3 reduced leakage with negligible accuracy loss. Lightweight training adjustments can improve the privacy-utility trade-off without complex defenses.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Empirical Evaluation of Data Poisoning Attacks in Supervised Learning

Data poisoning corrupts training data to degrade a model or to plant attacker-controlled behavior. This study evaluates two representative training-time attacks, label flipping and backdoor poisoning, on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST with three baseline classifiers: Logistic Regression, Linear SVM, and Random Forest. Clean training is compared with poisoning rates of 5%, 10%, and 20% using clean-test accuracy, macro-precision, macro-recall, macro-F1, and, for backdoors, attack success rate. Label flipping caused clear degradation, largest for Logistic Regression and Linear SVM, while Random Forest stayed comparatively stable. Backdoor poisoning reached attack success rates from 0.9667 to 1.0000 on both datasets and all three models while often keeping clean-test performance near baseline. The results separate indiscriminate poisoning, which shows up in standard metrics, from targeted backdoor poisoning, which stays comparatively stealthy while embedding highly effective malicious behavior, and they support security-oriented evaluation beyond conventional clean-test metrics.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

DeFiFusion: Combining Transaction Events with Smart Contracts to Detect Price Manipulation Attacks

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as a rapidly growing blockchain-based financial service, where market transaction dynamics and underlying smart contract logic are intricately intertwined. This autonomous interplay, while eliminating centralized intermediaries, significantly expands the vulnerability surface of DeFi protocols to Price Manipulation Attacks (PMAs), which have already inflicted catastrophic financial losses. Despite their gravity, existing detection paradigms suffer from fundamental limitations. Transaction-centric methods lack awareness of contract execution semantics, making them prone to false positives under legitimate market volatility, while static contract analyses ignore real transaction behaviors and frequently report vulnerabilities that are infeasible to exploit in practice. We present DeFiFusion, a dual-modal PMA detection framework that closes this gap by jointly modeling transaction events and smart contract semantics within a unified pipeline. Our core insight is that PMA maliciousness emerges only from the interaction between transaction behaviors and the contract logic they exploit; neither signal suffices in isolation. Accordingly, we derive price-manipulation-aware event encoding for extracting fine-grained temporal and economic features tailored to manipulation patterns. We further introduce LLM-based contract semantic extraction to supply the execution-logic context that prior behavioral methods lack. To fuse these modalities, we propose a Dual-Modal Projection-Fusion Transformer with T5-style relative positional encoding, capturing the cyclic multi-stage execution structures that distinguish PMAs from benign market activity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeFiFusion consistently achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, effectively recalling 222 of the 225 PMA cases while maintaining a precision of 96.10%.

cs.CR↗