A Comprehensive Review of Phishing in Cybersecurity: Risks, Impacts, and Defence Strategies

Phishing is probably one among the many serious challenges in the realm of cybersecurity today, it both exploits a very clear dimension of technological vulnerability and exploits human psychology. The review consolidates research on phishing-from simple email scams to very sophisticated attacks using machine learning and artificial intelligence and discusses their key techniques along with the psychological roots of trust exploitation, cognitive overload, and emotional manipulation for the users. Moreover, the paper identifies the critical impacts both to people and organizations: monetary damage, identity theft, and reputational damage. A review of the defences currently in use ranges from user education and training to the very advanced technological solutions, including AI-driven phishing detection. The identified gaps in literature include the necessity of studies on the long-term effects on the thought of people and a much stronger integration of human-centred and technological defences. The paper also discusses future research directions by motivating and proposing more adaptive and resilient defence mechanisms to combat this continuously evolving nature of phishing attacks in the world.