The Malware Arcade

According to the Wall Street Journal, North Korea has moved on from badly Photoshopped propaganda images as its primary weapon against the West and graduated to something subtler: online games bundled with malware, designed to harvest IP addresses and user data from players around the world. A South Korean businessman was arrested for attempting to smuggle North Korean-developed software into the country for exactly this purpose.

An unnamed police official was quoted saying that online games and pornography are easy-to-distribute tools that help North Korean hackers execute their plans. Which is, honestly, a fair assessment of human psychology if not exactly a flattering one. You can build the most elaborate geopolitical threat architecture imaginable and it still comes down to: people will click on free stuff.

The actual reach of those games is probably limited, though. If North Korea’s graphic design capabilities are anything like their Photoshop work—and there’s no reason to believe otherwise—the visuals are lodged somewhere around 1993. Which means the biggest threat may simply be that a generation of players develops inexplicably fond memories of ugly sprites and can’t explain why.