What are the West's offesive cyber attack capabilities toward Russia?

Question

For a couple decades, Russian military-adjacent hacker farms have treated Western businesses as a free-fire zone for ransomware, malware and data exfiltration. There seems to be a general assumption and fear that, if ordered to, Russian cyber gangs could bring down critical infrastructure, up to the point of causing mass casualties across the West. To this point, Russian incursions have mostly been met with targeted sanctions, without major cyber reprisals along the lines of, e.g. Israel's attack on the Iranian nuclear programme at Netanz. (That we know of).There also seems to be a lingering feeling that Russia isn't as dependent on network technology as the West is, therefore they have a somewhat asymmetrical advantage in this form of warfare. But surely that's not true now, if it ever was.If NATO were to take the gloves off and attack Russia in cyberspace, what would its capabilities be, and what would such a war look like? Would we see nuclear plants exploding on both sides? Which force is actually superior offensively in this theater?

gregjor · Accepted Answer

Does unleashing Facebook and Twitter and Instagram on the world count as offensive capability? I think America is winning in that theater. What about Windows 11 &mdash; surely a crippling blow to the enemies of the West.

theGeatZhopa · Answer

The Russians. Much more experience, as you said. And, there is a possibility to cut wires for both parties. I think Russia has less incoming cables so it's easier for them to close the digital door.
Public transportation and a few power plants would be my aim. Whilst making chaos, at random hack anything what's open.
The nuclear plants and other very critical systems are airgaped for sure.

austincheney · Answer

The goals of state-sponsored cyber warfare are:
* Intelligence gathering
* Foreign military disruption
* Infrastructure disruption
* Civilian misinformation campaigns
* Civilian commerce disruption
* Trade disruption
The goals of cyber warfare campaigns are typically limited by the proxy relationships between national powers. For example China has sophisticated cyber capabilities but do not want to do anything that will damage economic relationships which includes any form of political interference thereby largely limiting their threat to the US to military and intelligence operations.
When you consider there are many players each of whose goals are a combination of national priorities and political relationships this gets complicated.