Picture this: You post photos online from a trip to Brazil. The next day, an email arrives from the hotel where you stayed, thanking you for your visit and offering a special discount on your next stay. The email references your recent trip, the hotel's name looks right and the link looks legitimate.
But the hotel never sent it. An AI model generated the email after scraping details from your vacation posts.
Researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington have shown that widely available AI tools can gather details from people's public social media posts and use them to quickly generate highly personalized scam emails by targeting large numbers of people, a tactic known as context-aware spear phishing. The emails are designed to trick recipients into clicking malicious links and handing over sensitive information, such as passwords or credit card numbers.
"Anyone can be the attacker, and that makes it scarier," said Shirin Nilizadeh, an associate professor in UTA's Department of Computer Science and Engineering who led the study. "With these AI models, they don't need to do that much. They can just tell them what they want them to do."
From job titles to daily life
Spear phishing isn't new. Dr. Nilizadeh said most targeted scams have relied on static details about a person, such as their job title or employer. This study examines a more sophisticated type of attack, one that draws on details of people's everyday lives shared online.
"Now scammers can use people's social interactions and their daily lives and use it in their emails," she said. "It's more personalized, and it can make people more vulnerable."
Elham Pourabbas Vafa, a graduate student in computer science and the co-author of the study's findings, said the AI tools pulled details from people's recent social media posts, including photos, and used that information to create personalized emails. The researchers tested emails based on travel, events people were interested in, such as concerts, and even concerns they had shared online. They also tailored subject lines, sender names and links to each recipient.
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"The person who receives this kind of spear-phishing email is going to find it very credible because it is referencing details specific to their recent experiences," Pourabbas Vafa said.
In a user study, participants gave the AI-generated emails high marks for quality, underscoring what researchers say makes these attacks so dangerous.
Testing the safeguards
AI companies already use safety filters designed to block harmful requests. But the researchers found that these filters largely failed to detect requests to create personalized scam emails.
The team tested several widely used safety tools, including Llama Guard, ShieldGemma and WildGuard. With their default settings, the tools detected just 0% to 19% of the attack requests.
The researchers then proposed ways to stop the emails from being generated in the first place. When the safety tools were given specific instructions to recognize these attacks, their detection rates rose to as high as 99%.
"We are urging AI companies to take these kinds of attacks seriously," Nilizadeh said. "They need to put safeguards in place to prevent their tools from being misused to create highly targeted social engineering attacks."
The researchers omitted the exact instructions used to produce the scam emails from the public version of their paper to prevent others from misusing them.
The study has been accepted for presentation at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in Seoul, South Korea, in March 2027. Pourabbas Vafa also presented the research at the Texas Security Workshop at The University of Texas at Dallas.
About The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA)
The University of Texas at Arlington is a growing public research university in the heart of Dallas-Fort Worth. With a student body of over 42,700, UTA is the second-largest institution in the University of Texas System, offering more than 190 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Recognized as a Carnegie R-1 university, UTA stands among the nation's top 5% of institutions for research activity. UTA and its 300,000 alumni generate an annual economic impact of $28.8 billion for the state. The University has received the Innovation and Economic Prosperity designation from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and has earned recognition for its focus on student access and success, considered key drivers to economic growth and social progress for North Texas and beyond.
