Engineering and Technology | Open Access |

Psychological Surface Vectors: Mitigating Large Language Model-Driven Social Engineering via Behavioral Anomaly Detection

Dr. Elena V. Rostova , Department of Computational Security, Moscow, Russia

Abstract

Context: The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has lowered the barrier to entry for sophisticated social engineering attacks. Adversaries can now automate the inference of psychological traits from user data to generate highly persuasive, targeted phishing content.
Problem: Traditional cybersecurity defenses, such as signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and standard spam filters, are increasingly ineffective against these syntactically perfect and contextually aware AI-generated attacks. They fail to detect the subtle semantic anomalies that characterize algorithmic psychological manipulation.
Method: This study investigates the efficacy of an unsupervised learning framework designed to detect behavioral anomalies in email communications. We simulated an LLM-driven attack campaign that tailors phishing narratives to the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). We then evaluated a hybrid detection model combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for sequence analysis and Isolation Forests for anomaly scoring.
Results: The simulation demonstrated that personality-aligned LLM attacks achieved a theoretical click-through rate 40% higher than generic phishing. However, the proposed behavioral anomaly detection system identified 88.5% of these sophisticated attacks by analyzing deviations in semantic density and communication patterns, outperforming traditional keyword-based filters which detected only 34%.
Conclusion: While LLMs significantly enhance the lethality of social engineering, analyzing the "psychological surface" of communication via unsupervised learning offers a robust countermeasure. Future defense architectures must move beyond content analysis to context and behavioral intent analysis.

Keywords

Large Language Models, Social Engineering, Behavioral Anomaly Detection, Big Five Personality Traits

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Dr. Elena V. Rostova. (2025). Psychological Surface Vectors: Mitigating Large Language Model-Driven Social Engineering via Behavioral Anomaly Detection. The American Journal of Engineering and Technology, 7(10), 178–184. Retrieved from https://www.theamericanjournals.com/index.php/tajet/article/view/6944