“If the government wanted to do something about this, I would suspect they would do something more targeted toward the leadership rather than just shutting down the network,” said Eugene Spafford, a professor of information security at Purdue University. “Teenagers with botnets regularly shut down networks.”

Targeting the financial assets of North Korean leaders (rather than the country’s Internet equipment) would be much more closely aligned with President Obama’s warning of a “proportional response” — and something the White House could accomplish that nameless hacktivists probably couldn’t on their own, Spafford added.