[christophilus]

My guess is that there are many factors.

- More infrastructure than ever has some exposure to the internet - Outsourcing at massive scale (probably) makes consistent security screening harder - There are more programmers in the world than ever and so (probably) there are more black hats, malicious hackers, etc - As time goes on, there are more and more aging computer systems, thus (probably) there are more and more vulnerabilities in the wild - As time goes on, systems accrete complexity, thus (probably) there are more and more vulnerabilities in the wild

But yes, I do think cryptocurrency is an important change. Cash is still king when it comes to crime, but crypto does make crossing borders much easier.

[novaRom]

The whole thing is very asymmetric:

Your own jurisdiction and law enforcement have no power on foreign territory; but foreign organizations (state sponsored or not) located there have freedom to penetrate your society and economy. Moreover, foreign governments may deliberately ignore your requests to investigate.

Thanks to technologies and to chaotic reactions to modern day problems (including covid-19 pandemic) it looks like modern forms of independent sovereign states are very archaic.