Evaluating the Efficacy of Large Language Models in Identifying Phishing Attempts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phishing, a prevalent cybercrime tactic for decades, remains a significant threat in today's digital world. By leveraging clever social engineering elements and modern technology, cybercrime targets many individuals, businesses, and organizations to exploit trust and security. These cyber-attackers are often disguised in many trustworthy forms to appear as legitimate sources. By cleverly using psychological elements like urgency, fear, social proof, and other manipulative strategies, phishers can lure individuals into revealing sensitive and personalized information. Building on this pervasive issue within modern technology, this paper will aim to analyze the effectiveness of 15 Large Language Models (LLMs) in detecting phishing attempts, specifically focusing on a randomized set of “419 Scam” emails. The objective is to determine which LLMs can accurately detect phishing emails by analyzing a text file containing email metadata based on predefined criteria. The experiment concluded that the following models, ChatGPT 3.5, GPT-3.5-Turbo-Instruct, and ChatGPT, were the most effective in detecting phishing emails.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.066 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".