Artificial Intelligence-Driven Approaches for Phishing Detection and Cyber Threat Analysis: a Comprehensive Review

The rapid proliferation of digital communication and internet-based services has led to an exponential rise in cyber threats, particularly phishing attacks and social engineering exploits. Traditional rule-based detection mechanisms have proven insufficient in combating sophisticated, evolving threats. This paper presents a comprehensive review of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) driven approaches employed for phishing URL detection, email classification, and broader cyber threat analysis. We examine supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning models including Decision Trees, Random Forests, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, evaluating their effectiveness based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The study also explores feature extraction methodologies, publicly available datasets, and the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for semantic analysis of phishing content. Findings indicate that ensemble learning methods and deep learning architectures consistently outperform traditional classifiers, achieving detection rates above 97% in controlled environments. The paper concludes with identified research gaps, limitations of current models, and directions for future work including real-time adaptive detection systems.