See also Russian hackers being notorious simply because Russia is willing to turn a blind eye to cyber crime that doesn't target Russia

Crime being illegal doesn't prevent crime, but it adds an enormous amount of friction. In the West if you are decent at hacking, low-level APIs or reverse engineering you could turn to cyber crime. But if you instead get a regular job in cyber security or software engineering you still get a good salary, and don't have to worry about your online friends being police informants, can tell your potential significant other what you do to earn a living, get money wired directly to your bank account instead of having to go through costly intermediaries with significant risks, don't have trouble with the tax authority, etc.

If you reduce the legal opportunities and remove the downsides of the illegal ones the calculation completely changes, and with it the talent pool

It’s not just that they don’t care about being a pariah state, it’s a literal fund raising exercise, unlike most other state sanctioned hacking.

This is my assumption as well. In general it seems like hacking becomes a lot easier (still not easy of course, just easier) when you have no fear of getting caught or going to jail.

Does anyone remember LAPSUS$ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsus$ from a while back? It was reported for a while that it was largely made up of teenagers, and it seems two did get caught. I recall their whole MO being brazen social engineering/using stolen credentials in a way that got them caught pretty quickly, but also got results fast.

"Pariah", they've had the longest embargo on earth (which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths), they had 90% of their whole countries infrastructure bombed by the US, and the Korean war has been called a genocide in the North by many scholars.

The world doesnt make sense if you ignore history.

They probably hack for the same reason the west does it: attack/defense and money.

Why would they need such incentives? All they gotta do is give them a decent wage and they will be happy, which in North Korea is a paltry sum. Its not like regular North Koreans are traveling around the world, they couldn't afford it even without any other restrictions, so they have zero risk of arrest or punishment from other nations.

If I told you today that I will pay you a million dollars to go fuck around with some North Korean servers, and doing it completely anonymously with the full protection and sanction of your government, would you say no?

I think you may have some unrealistic views on how North Korea operates internally. 99% of their population lives completely normal lives and has zero extra interactions with the government beyond basic grunt military service which is common across much of the world, and paperwork for licensing, permits, and taxes. We only see the worst possible views of North Korea from the outside, slathered with thick layers of additional propaganda on top of it.

> That's always pretty uhhhh motivational

If you only met the world on American TV, yes.

Maybe they hire international talent.

How cunning and evil it is that America funded the internet and then allowed it to spread around the world.

If you're worried about "absolute control over digital systems", notice how many standards get published describing how those digital systems work -- you're welcome to reimplement them if you'd like more control.