The Evolving Landscape of Cybercrime: Trends, Techniques, and Countermeasures — A Comprehensive Review

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Cybercrime; cyber security; digital forensics; ransom ware; malware; intrusion detection; AI in security; cyber defence; cyber threats

Abstract

Cybercrime has now been enhanced to be more than a digital mischief, but instead it is an international criminal ecosystem. The proliferating cloud infrastructure, the mobile technology, and the artificial intelligence have not only expanded the attack area but also enabled the threat actors to operate on a massive scale and anonymity as never seen before. The review is based on the analysis of the new trends, incentives, and reactions of the contemporary cybercrime environment with the help of the analysis of a wide array of scholarly and technical literature. It looks at the evolution of attack techniques phishing, ransom ware, even more advanced, long-term and AI-assisted attacks, and explains how organized criminal enterprises, and black market activities of the digital world have come into being. The paper also looks at the evolution of defensive systems, e.g., AI-assisted detection, digital forensics, and the promotion of international legal systems. Findings have revealed that despite the improvement of defensive technologies in order to establish cyber resilience, the continuous maleficence of attackers is still outpacing defensive maleficence. The paper identifies the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in technology, policy, and behavioural studies to result in efficient cyber defence and digital security on the global level.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Narule Jugal Kumar
AU  - P. Manjunath
AU  - M. R. Architha
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/05
TI  - The Evolving Landscape of Cybercrime: Trends, Techniques, and Countermeasures — A Comprehensive Review
BT  - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advances in Forensics and Cyber Technologies (ICFACT 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 330
EP  - 344
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_29
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_29
ID  - Kumar2026
ER  -