I do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power, water treatment, communications, hospitals, public transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.

If that were possible, then why didn't Russia, which might have the most experienced pool of cyber-attack skills in the world, do it to Ukraine?

They did try, but ukraine were suspicious something was going to happen (massive army suddenly forming near their border) and they had spent time securing stuff

They'd also done it on and off for like a decade already so everyone was used to it and had mitigations in place.

They did, to some extent, though not to the degree I described.

As an American, I would be more worried about China than Russia though. They makes a lot of our hardware and firmware, giving them plenty of chances to embed killswitches and zero-days. They have possibly the most successful industrial espionage program in the world, giving them the opportunity to find vulns in other systems and embed agents inside critical platforms. They have deeply internalized the concept of fighting where their enemy is weakest not where they are strongest, so they have likely invested in attacking the American military at home rather than on the field.

it would get them nothing.

they did attack satcom systems to the point of bricking them.

what do you think would happen if you turn off critical infra for a country?

mass civilian death/suffering. military likely hardly affected but extremely motivated...

its counter productive.

That doesn't seem to be stopping Russia from engaging in the energy war, where they're "wasting" incredibly valuable and rare precision missiles attacking substations and power generation.

So far, this has been only moderately successful in impacting the military, because most of Ukraine's military production is not actually located in Ukraine, and because they've gotten quite good at repairing their electrical grid.

This was generally true of allied strategic bombing campaigns in WWII as well. Simple adaptations like building walls between sections of the plant to require more bombs to attack any given target, hardened shelters for skilled employees, and staging parts outside of the plant enabled some targets to maintain better than 50% uptime during aggressive bombing campaigns. Look into the Oil campaign[1] for more details.

It is interesting to see how precision missiles and cheap drones may change this in the future.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II

they sincerely didn't think they'd need to

That's stage 2. Stage 1 is election fixing, subversion and capture of foreign governments through bribery and kompromat.

Yeah that's why we're expecting stage 2 next.

Only if they absolutely need it. Nobody would spoil an asset like that. Maybe they would turn off mobile in Taiwan if they control their network. I didn't check which technology provider they use.

I don't think it would permanently spoil anything. China would just stop the phone network from being used to coordinate a response.

No mobile network can be an inconvenience but who has to respond will have the means to communicate no matter what. Furthermore every single common person will feel a personal level of danger and they won't simply shrug about the destiny of a remote island somewhere on the map.

The people we are talking about live in Taiwan, so Taiwan is not a remote island for them.

Why? They'll take down BT landlines in case I need to call my auntie and tell her about the news?

tbh breaking public internet/phones will probably be done by a local government trying to do something nasty. Stop people coordinating and turning up places they might get in the way.

I think my tin foil hat was askew. There. All better.

Gotta hold onto the 0day for that one.