Email Summarization to Assist Users in Phishing Identification
This addresses phishing threats for email users by proposing an assistive tool, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing transformer methods without clear SOTA claims.
The paper tackles the problem of phishing email detection by developing a transformer-based system that analyzes psychological triggers and malicious intent to generate summaries, aiming to help users identify phishing emails and learn patterns, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
Cyber-phishing attacks recently became more precise, targeted, and tailored by training data to activate only in the presence of specific information or cues. They are adaptable to a much greater extent than traditional phishing detection. Hence, automated detection systems cannot always be 100% accurate, increasing the uncertainty around expected behavior when faced with a potential phishing email. On the other hand, human-centric defence approaches focus extensively on user training but face the difficulty of keeping users up to date with continuously emerging patterns. Therefore, advances in analyzing the content of an email in novel ways along with summarizing the most pertinent content to the recipients of emails is a prospective gateway to furthering how to combat these threats. Addressing this gap, this work leverages transformer-based machine learning to (i) analyze prospective psychological triggers, to (ii) detect possible malicious intent, and (iii) create representative summaries of emails. We then amalgamate this information and present it to the user to allow them to (i) easily decide whether the email is "phishy" and (ii) self-learn advanced malicious patterns.