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LLM-PEA: Leveraging Large Language Models Against Phishing Email Attacks

Authors: Najmul Hassan, Prashanth BusiReddyGari, Haitao Zhao, Yihao Ren, Jinsheng Xu, Shaohu Zhang

Published: 2025-12-10

arXiv ID: 2512.10104v1

Added to Library: 2025-12-12 03:01 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

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.

🔍 Key Points

  • Proposes LLM-PEA framework to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) against phishing email attacks, addressing multiple attack vectors simultaneously.
  • Findings reveal that LLMs can achieve over 90% accuracy in phishing detection, yet show vulnerabilities to adversarial, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks.
  • Utilizes diverse datasets to comprehensively assess model robustness, including balanced, imbalanced, adversarial, prompt injection, and multilingual scenarios.
  • Demonstrates specific hardening requirements for LLMs to operate effectively in real-world email security applications.
  • Paper highlights the critical need for integrated security assessments that consider compound vulnerabilities from simultaneous attack vectors.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is significant as it highlights the dual role of LLMs as both powerful tools for phishing detection and targets of sophisticated adversarial attacks. The LLM-PEA framework provides a comprehensive methodology to understand and mitigate these vulnerabilities, making it a critical contribution to enhancing email security systems against evolving cyber threats.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

The findings and methodologies presented in this paper would be of great interest to AI security researchers as they address major concerns regarding the use of LLMs in real-world applications. Understanding how these models can be exploited not only informs future model development but also helps bolster defenses against increasingly sophisticated phishing tactics, which remain a leading vector for cyber intrusions.

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