> causes a minor temporary disruption in production
pick one
ETA: if someone created a virus that would just display the text "you've been hacked!" and then that virus infected thousands of computers around the world, that someone would have a visit from the FBI with very serious charges. I don't see how this is different.
I don’t understand. Industrial sabotage is an act of vandalism with the intended purpose of causing disruption in productivity. This incident in particular only caused a relatively minor disruption not much bigger then e.g. a partial github outage.
> I don't see how this is different.
The difference is in 1) the intended targets. This incident was targeted against particular industry. The worm you are describing would be indiscriminate and would have the potential to be 2) much larger scale and therefor you could deduce the 3) intention of your hypothetical attacker would not be to cause disruptions of productivity withing a particular industry, but rather to prank random strangers. The difference is rather obvious.