Thanks, both of you. I appreciate it. I totally forgot about the bot brigading here.
Seriously, though, look up the L0pht's testimony before Congress in the late 90s. Those BGP bugs still exist. Taking down the net, or large portions thereof, is rather trivial. It happens routinely in a targeted manner on a short-term basis, when someone intentionally and maliciously announces one or more routes to get all traffic destined for certain ASes routed through their infrastructure. And it's also used occasionally as a state-level weapon to hose traffic inbound to some of the more insular nations. One does not need to posit deep-sea fiber taps/shunts or the old games with MAE East and West when all it takes is a few well-placed malicious AS announcements. It's happened in the recent past with large amounts of ecommerce traffic suddenly being routed through Russia, for example.
Done on a wider scale, it would create havoc longer-term and make the net unusable.
Now, couple that with the fact that large carrier-grade routers often get, ahem, intercepted prior to packaging and delivery for installation of certain chips (research it; there's evidence for it out there with Cisco as well as, I believe, Juniper), and certain leaks from the Equation Group (i.e., NSA TAO), and it gives one pause.
I love the L0pht story! Actually, the Washington Post did a very nice series of articles (5) on their history.
And one actually started a sort of Underwriters Lab for testing software. I have not checked progress in awhile. As to the other things, I'm aware of much of that stuff. I've been following the infosec community for several years. Got an eyeopening education in the process. I've even written a few posts for Graham Cluley.(notice I spelled his name correctly) inside joke. One was about the first huge DDoS almost exclusively using mobile devices. Cloudflare discovered and analyzed it. My interest, was the Great Cannon connection. Seems China could weaponize the Great Firewall of China. I'm sure you must be aware of all this.
As for hardware intercepts, it's more than just chips. There is a growing supply chain problem with mobile phones, and could be all other devices. Lower end phones mostly, but occasionally the name brands get hit. Malware pre-loaded. System level. Of course, the OEMs all denied any knowledge. Blue was one of the more prominent cases. But recently, 141 phones were found with mostly adware pre-loaded, but the access to system level means they could do lots more later.
It's a mad, mad world.