Imagine a major conflict between the US and China or Russia escalates.

Would the net would be one of the first and major attack vectors? I think it might be.

But it's all a bit ephemeral to me. How would it go down? How would the countries attack and defend themselves?

Some ideas:

-) Disable / overload / damage / infiltrate infrastructure (power plants, hospitals, military installations, communication networks, ..) either via compromised nodes, backdoors or DOS

-) Defend by cutting off most international networking, except for some routes between military bases, etc.

-) Circumvent defenses by activating attack botnets inside target country(ies) before cutoff, or control them via agents and satellite connections

Or would the attacks be more subtle, mostly trying to gain intelligence via compromised communication networks?

Do you think the big players all have access to large, international botnets, or can quickly and automatically create botnets with tooling for known hacks / zero days?

Do they have suites of tooling for compromising and attacking infrastrucutre?

Do they have installations and established protocols at ISPs and major routing infrastructure (transatlantic cables, etc) to either close them of or use them for flooding target networks? And do so quickly?

Also, we hear hacking accusations against Russia and China regularly, but never against the US. I think they probably hack just about everyone and have compromised many foreign networks, but no one dares speak out about that publicly. Do you disagree?

So many questions...

I'd love to hear some opinions!