By the time Kim Jong-un came to power, Bureau 121 had been up and running for more than a decade. And while Kim is often caricatured as a buffoon in American pop culture, he deftly seized on an asymmetric capability that his father and grandfather—the Dear Leader and the Great Leader, respectively—had never exploited. At Kim’s direction, the North built up an army of upward of six thousand hackers, mostly based outside the country. (They eventually spread from China to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand, all countries that advertise something in short supply in North Korea: beach
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