as well as disgruntled former (or even current) employeers constantly trying to sabotage things (rife in broadcast engineering when I worked in that field) there is now a shit ton of pilfered GPL / other open source code in all sorts of things, especially low cost network hardware like routers.
Unfortunately the tech industry has always been like that even before computers were commonplace.
I’ve read stuff about denial of service attacks, sabotage and interception (by private and public sector) on telegraph and telephone networks in the late 19th/early 20th century across Europe; even when there wasn’t world wars or the Cold War.
It was a big reason why many countries nationalised their telecommunications with the PTT.
This was basically the telephone company, post service, the Communications Ministry and the parts of the security services that intercepted domestic and foreign comms all rolled into one. Of course there was all sorts of spying and surveillance; but there were more defined nation state boundaries and cultural/language barriers so you had a good idea of who was doing what.
They did (at least in the late 1980s) often seek out the kids who would get into hacking whilst they were still at high school and at least offer them work experience and get them to do something more productive with their skills. In many countries they employed these youngsters as apprentices with the promise of long term salaried careers; only to make a great number of them all redundant and privatise much of this infrastructure just as the Internet was put online (and stability was needed to link everyone up).
The new private companies only reluctantly invested in new staff and then only hired them short term as freelance contract workers who are constantly hustling for work and have no great loyalty to their employers, their country or local community. Then these companies all got split up to make more shareholder value with their fairly young managers being laid off and using their redundancy payments for various startups.
Although this may have appeared to have somehow made communications cheaper and more readily available; at least in Europe, Russia and Asia the governments actually still subsidise a lot of the infrastructure; which means they also feel entitled to monitor what might go through the networks. Thus we end up with all of todays security problems (not just surveillance worries but how reliable any technology is in times of crisis/emergency).
