What they were up to didn’t seem very scary at the time. But North Korean engineers learn fast—ask any missile scientist—and they got good quickly. “There was an enormous growth in capability from 2009 or so, when they were a joke,” said Ben Buchanan, a researcher at the Cyber Security Project at Harvard who has written extensively on the dilemmas of protecting networks in a world of cyber conflict. “They would execute a very basic attack against a minor web page put up by the White House or an American intelligence agency, and then their sympathizers would claim they’d hacked the US
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