And even if the United States was willing to retaliate, Kim calculated, doing so would not be easy. To most of the world, the absence of computer networks, of a wired society, is a sign of backwardness and weakness. But to Kim, this absence created a home-field advantage. A country cut off from the world, with few computer networks, is a lousy target: there are simply not enough “attack surfaces,” the entry-points for inserting malicious code, to make a retaliatory cyberattack on North Korea viable.
