Such an attack is, IMO, morally dubious.
North Korea is a poor country with millions of starving citizens, and rather than sending food aid, you broke down their only comms to the rest of the world?
North Korea is a poor country with millions of starving citizens, and rather than sending food aid, you broke down their only comms to the rest of the world?
Whom it did affect a bit, hopefully, were the people complicit in the repressive dictatorship that runs the country.
The repressive dictatorship that engages in, among many other bad things, scams and online fraud to partially finance the country. For this they of course use the internet. So, taking them off-line for a week may have prevented someone from getting scammed. Good result.
Probably didn’t. Can’t say definitively. Shipments of critical resources could have been disrupted, et cetera.
Doing this with zero context was probably reckless by this hacker. It also likely had zero real-world consequences.
There's rarely such a thing as a clear, objectively simple 'good result' for this sort of action because outcomes have knock-on effects. For example, if the North Koreans responsible for maintaining internet access were executed over this that diminishes the result significantly.
Only the elite in that country has access to the Internet. The starving citizens do not have access to the Internet, and even if they do/did, they're so heavily monitored the minute they even glanced at something controversial they'd be shipped to a concentration camp.
Sure, but then the overall population might be depending on it indirectly.
As an analogy, we should have empathy for homeless people stuck in poverty, but if one of them continually bikes to your house and tries to break in, is it morally dubious to eventually take their bike chain rather than just shooing them away each attempt? I imagine the moral razor would fall on similar lines.
In the homeless analogy, maybe the attempted-robber's friends go hungry, since he usually uses the bicycle to go to the grocery store.
To me, I don't imagine this changes the calculus much, since almost any intervention will have side-effects.
Every resistance action carried out by every resistance group against tyranny throughout history has been washed in the blood of people who did nothing wrong.