North Korean teams tend to perform very well in coding contests, so it’s a safe bet that North Korea is quite good at nurturing a small slice of elite computing talent.
The brightest students of most nations are often sent abroad to enrich their countries with knowledge from the great universities. NK is almost unique in its inability to do this at non-Chinese great universities, so that is the only viable route.
"North Korean hackers are sent vocationally to Shenyang, China for special training. They are trained to deploy malware of all types onto computers, computer networks, and servers."[3][4]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_China#North_Koreans...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20090114201016/http://news.xinhu...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group#Education
4: https://web.archive.org/web/20180621134306/https://www.scmp....