An Improved Transformer-based Model for Detecting Phishing, Spam, and Ham: A Large Language Model Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces IPSDM, a fine-tuned BERT-based model that enhances detection of phishing and spam emails, demonstrating improved classification on various datasets and marking a significant step towards applying large language models for cybersecurity.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel fine-tuned BERT-based model, IPSDM, specifically designed for detecting phishing and spam emails, advancing the application of LLMs in cybersecurity.

Findings

IPSDM outperforms existing methods on multiple datasets

Fine-tuning BERT improves email classification accuracy

The approach demonstrates potential for enhancing email security

Abstract

Phishing and spam detection is long standing challenge that has been the subject of much academic research. Large Language Models (LLM) have vast potential to transform society and provide new and innovative approaches to solve well-established challenges. Phishing and spam have caused financial hardships and lost time and resources to email users all over the world and frequently serve as an entry point for ransomware threat actors. While detection approaches exist, especially heuristic-based approaches, LLMs offer the potential to venture into a new unexplored area for understanding and solving this challenge. LLMs have rapidly altered the landscape from business, consumers, and throughout academia and demonstrate transformational potential for the potential of society. Based on this, applying these new and innovative approaches to email detection is a rational next step in academic research. In this work, we present IPSDM, our model based on fine-tuning the BERT family of models to specifically detect phishing and spam email. We demonstrate our fine-tuned version, IPSDM, is able to better classify emails in both unbalanced and balanced datasets. This work serves as an important first step towards employing LLMs to improve the security of our information systems.