[terryf]

The starving, and heavily repressed citizens do not have access to the internet in NK. This attack did not affect any of them to any extent.

Whom it did affect a bit, hopefully, were the people complicit in the repressive dictatorship that runs the country.

The repressive dictatorship that engages in, among many other bad things, scams and online fraud to partially finance the country. For this they of course use the internet. So, taking them off-line for a week may have prevented someone from getting scammed. Good result.

[JumpCrisscross]

> attack did not affect any of them to any extent

Probably didn’t. Can’t say definitively. Shipments of critical resources could have been disrupted, et cetera.

Doing this with zero context was probably reckless by this hacker. It also likely had zero real-world consequences.

[onion2k]

Good result.

There's rarely such a thing as a clear, objectively simple 'good result' for this sort of action because outcomes have knock-on effects. For example, if the North Koreans responsible for maintaining internet access were executed over this that diminishes the result significantly.

[golergka]

Good point, but the original comment was about whether the hacker was morally dubious, not the outcomes. If a bad actor does bad things because of what you did, you're not morally responsible for it — he is.