X-Phishing-Writer: A Framework for Cross-Lingual Phishing Email Generation

Cybercrime is projected to cause annual business losses of $10.5 trillion by 2025, a significant concern given that a majority of security breaches are due to human errors, especially through phishing attacks. The rapid increase in daily identified phishing sites over the past decade underscores the pressing need to enhance defenses against such attacks. Social Engineering Drills (SEDs) are essential in raising awareness about phishing, yet face challenges in creating effective and diverse phishing email content. These challenges are exacerbated by the limited availability of public datasets and concerns over using external language models like ChatGPT for phishing email generation. To address these issues, this paper introduces X-Phishing-Writer, a novel cross-lingual Few-Shot phishing email generation framework. X-Phishing-Writer allows for the generation of emails based on minimal user input, leverages single-language datasets for multilingual email generation, and is designed for internal deployment using a lightweight, open-source language model. Incorporating Adapters into an Encoder-Decoder architecture, X-Phishing-Writer marks a significant advancement in the field, demonstrating superior performance in generating phishing emails across 25 languages when compared to baseline models. Experimental results and real-world drills involving 1,682 users showcase a 17.67% email open rate and a 13.33% hyperlink click-through rate, affirming the framework’s effectiveness and practicality in enhancing phishing awareness and defense.