North Korea running malware-laden gambling websites as-a-service

North Korea's latest money-making venture is the production and sale of gambling websites that come pre-infected with malware, according to South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS). The Service on Wednesday identified South Korean cyber crime organizations as buyers of the sites. Reports allege that the North Korean …

[Winkypop]

With or without the malware

Online gambling sites are well dodgy.

Life’s too short, and money too hard to come by, to waste time there.

[Grogan]

I don't understand why anybody tolerates that little kleptocratic fiefdom. Even China should want to spank them (stealing bank accounts from Chinese nationals etc.)

If there's a people that need liberating on this planet, it's North Koreans. What awful conditions they live under. Absurdly so.

[I ain't Spartacus]

For the Chinese Communist Party I'd suspect it's a case of "better the devil you know". Sure it's a bit disruptive having North Korean migrants wandering around the border area - but they are a source of cheap labour, and China's labour force is already shrinking, due to demographic change.

Sure there are millions of people suffering, and horrible "re-education" camps and tyranny. But that's all part of being in a communist party. So no problems.

China is the source of a lot of North Korea's oil, so they can cause the government a lot of pain. They've almost certainly got friends in the mid to high levels of the military and bureaucracy as well.

However cutting North Korea adrift leaves two major issues. Firstly instability. That makes people nervous. And now North Korea has nukes, that instability could be pretty bloody unstable. The other problem is that if South Korea ends up absorbing North Korea (united Germany style), or China ends up running the place, then China now has a land border iwth a Western-allied Korea. They shouldn't really see this as a threat (as if Korea would try to invade?), but I suspect they do.

I suppose a third point might be that as a kind-of communist dictatorship it's not good for business when another kind-of communist dicatorship collapses. Makes the brand look bad. Even worse if it gets taken over by a democracy and run properly. Look at Putin's troubles with Ukraine. The bits of the ex Soviet empire that joined NATO and/or the EU are now economically motoring ahead - and are richer, far better run, and better places to live than Russia or any of the CIS states. One suggestion for Putin's invasion of Ukraine was that if it became a relatively successful democracy on his doorstep, his regime would start to look terrible in comparison. And Russians might start to wonder why they couldn't have some of what Ukraine are getting. Ukrainians have also suffered pretty bad governments, but have chucked a couple of them out and tried to get themselves more democracy and less corruption, because they can see how rich Poland, Czechia etc are getting - and they can see how awful Russia has become.