Living up to your screen name I see, but in all seriousness, I fully agree. The average person running the laptops in a spare bedroom may have no idea the scope of what they're involved with. Especially if they're being duped as well.
Imagine a non technical person being told they're helping run an "edge data center, close to the users. Running our laptops helps Netflix/facebook/etc (insert big tech name of your choice) run faster for you and your neighbors and well pay you to do it."
Easy to imagine a non technical person buying that lie.
NK "fake employee" finds a non technical American to run their laptop farm by lying to them that running these laptops is helping make their access to some service faster.
I'm sure many, many countries have botnets. I have a bunch of those countries which I consider irresponsible and wreckless in my radar, not only north korea.
These aren't botnets in the traditional sense. These operations need a US-based laptop (they receive it by mail, from the "target" corporation upon employment) and they also need the mini-kvm device to be plugged in. Then the remote agents connect via that kvm, to make detection harder. To an enterprise IDS/IPS the laptop seems connected from a residential, US IP address (expected).
They've already arrested some people involved in this, they have devices as evidence. It's pretty well documented at this point.
Imagine a non technical person being told they're helping run an "edge data center, close to the users. Running our laptops helps Netflix/facebook/etc (insert big tech name of your choice) run faster for you and your neighbors and well pay you to do it."
Easy to imagine a non technical person buying that lie.