Phishing remains a pervasive cyber threat, as attackers craft deceptive
emails to lure victims into revealing sensitive information. While Artificial
Intelligence (AI), in particular, deep learning, has become a key component in
defending against phishing attacks, these approaches face critical limitations.
The scarcity of publicly available, diverse, and updated data, largely due to
privacy concerns, constrains detection effectiveness. As phishing tactics
evolve rapidly, models trained on limited, outdated data struggle to detect
new, sophisticated deception strategies, leaving systems and people vulnerable
to an ever-growing array of attacks. We propose the first Phishing Evolution
FramEworK (PEEK) for augmenting phishing email datasets with respect to quality
and diversity, and analyzing changing phishing patterns for detection to adapt
to updated phishing attacks. Specifically, we integrate large language models
(LLMs) into the process of adversarial training to enhance the performance of
the generated dataset and leverage persuasion principles in a recurrent
framework to facilitate the understanding of changing phishing strategies. PEEK
raises the proportion of usable phishing samples from 21.4% to 84.8%,
surpassing existing works that rely on prompting and fine-tuning LLMs. The
phishing datasets provided by PEEK, with evolving phishing patterns, outperform
the other two available LLM-generated phishing email datasets in improving
detection robustness. PEEK phishing boosts detectors' accuracy to over 88% and
reduces adversarial sensitivity by up to 70%, still maintaining 70% detection
accuracy against adversarial attacks.