TL;DR: We ran a human subject study on whether language models can successfully spear-phish people. We use AI agents built from GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to search the web for available information on a target and use this for highly personalized phishing messages. We achieved a click-through rate of above 50% for our AI-generated phishing emails.

Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00586

This post is intended to be a brief summary of the main findings, these are some key insights we gained:

1. AI spear-phishing is highly effective, receiving a click-through rate of more than 50%, significantly outperforming our control group.
2. AI-spear phishing is also highly cost-efficient, reducing costs by up to 50 times compared to manual attacks.
3. AI models are highly capable of gathering open-source intelligence. They produce accurate and useful profiles for 88% of targets. Only 4% of the generated profiles contained inaccurate information.
4. Safety guardrails are not a [...]

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Outline:

(00:30) Full paper:

(01:35) Abstract

(03:19) Method

(04:03) Results

(06:30) Automated intent detection

(07:57) The economics of AI-enhanced phishing

(08:36) Future Work

(09:57) Conclusion

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