ESCALATING CYBERCRIME: TRENDS, CAUSES, AND PREVENTION METHODS

Cybercrime continues to escalate in both volume and sophistication, inflicting substantial financial, operational, and reputational damage on organizations worldwide. This paper examines prominent threat trends, including phishing and business email compromise (BEC), ransomware, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, data theft, and supply chain compromises. These trends are driven by persistent vulnerabilities such as credential compromise, human factors, misconfigurations, unpatched systems, and inadequate monitoring. Drawing on established frameworks, the analysis grounds the discussion in the CIA triad, ISO risk management standards, defense-in-depth principles, the multi-stage attack lifecycle, and Zero Trust architecture.