People's Liberation Army policy
In a document of more than a decade ago, China's People's Liberation Army published a document which stressed the importance of blinding an opponent before launching an attack. According to this approach, an attack begins with disabling connections and/or feeding incorrect information to specific points on the data infrastructure. This mode of attack is anything but brute force, and requires extensive reconnoitering of a target to bring off properly. Through the PRC's "Titan Rain" probes, such surveillance has been underway for more than a decade.
To presume the cutting edge of a cyberattack would take aircraft out of the sky, blow up reservoirs and poison urban areas completely ignores how devastating interruption of power and/or communications would be. All of the above is possible by hijacking of power and data systems, but the principal damage is paralysis of the vast number of ordinary systems on which everything else depends.
