Comment by WJW
19 hours ago
Sure, if there was an active war going on. But while NK and the USA are not exactly friendly, they're definitely not at war either. In basically any other field, the question of "what do we do when a nation state deploys hundreds of people, well funded and well trained, specifically to screw us over?" is met with some variant of "that's why we pay taxes, so the army can protect us from that".
A normal bank being robbed for 1.5 billion, ESPECIALLY by a pariah country like North Korea, would absolutely not be met with "oh that was definitely your own fault" as many of the sibling comments seem to imply.
A normal bank was robbed of $1B back in 2016, likely by North Korea, and the global reaction was pretty much a collective shrug:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
According to that page, the global reaction was to block most ($850M) of the fraudulent payments, recover a third of the remainder, add additional security to the SWIFT network and raise standards for banks, and push for penalties for the criminals who participated. That seems like more than a shrug.
And we are likely to see the same response here. Those coins are easily tracked, so the attacker is going to be lucky to get 25% of the value by selling them to someone prepared to take the risk of laundering them.
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Say what you want about CBDCs, but they would fix this specific failure mode of digital assets where an enemy nation-state can steal $1.5 billion worth of the token.
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Actually we have been at war with North Korea continously since the 1950s, we only have a cease fire with them.
The Korean War ended with an armistice signed on July 27, 1953, which stopped active fighting but did not establish a formal peace treaty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict
I know that soldiers stationed in South Korea get paid at the wartime rate.
Only another 300 years to beat the record between Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly.
Maybe the US and North Korea will sign a peace treaty in the 24th century. Captain Picard can mediate.
US and North Korea have never been at war though. The US (and other countries) assisted South Korea under the UN flag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command
It is not about “active war”. It is about mitigating known, routine risks. You are confusing a description of the problem and a description of the solution.
Routine harmful cyberattacks is a problem. You do not get to abdicate responsibility because it is too hard. If you can not handle the operational environment, then do not operate in it.
Maybe the solution is “go to war due to cyberattacks”, but that is not happening right now so their systems are inadequate for the expected operational environment (i.e. incompetent). And everybody knows this is the operational environment, everybody knows they can not deal with expected problems, and everybody does not adequately inform their customers because it would be detrimental to their bottom line.
As you say, it's weird. There absolutely is an all out war going on online. They attack us and we presumably throw just as much at them.
The chief US adversaries have the advantage of national firewalls, and less of their crucial infrastructure is online, so it is perhaps less effective against them. Or for all I know they are subject to equivalent thefts every day and just keep it out of the news.