If I set up a nice shopfront and invite customers in, and then start kneecapping everybody who walks through the door, you gonna bet the city will have something to say about it. I'm not kneecapping the city, just its citizens, so why should they care - and I'm doing it on my own property which they voluntarily entered after seeing my "dollar store" sign out the front - so it's their own damn fault for believing my sign.
There is a fundamental difference between physical violence like kneecapping and industrial sabotage which causes a minor temporary disruption in production, which is why the former is punishable by most national laws, while the latter isn’t.
> causes a minor temporary disruption in production
pick one
ETA: if someone created a virus that would just display the text "you've been hacked!" and then that virus infected thousands of computers around the world, that someone would have a visit from the FBI with very serious charges. I don't see how this is different.
I don’t understand. Industrial sabotage is an act of vandalism with the intended purpose of causing disruption in productivity. This incident in particular only caused a relatively minor disruption not much bigger then e.g. a partial github outage.
> I don't see how this is different.
The difference is in 1) the intended targets. This incident was targeted against particular industry. The worm you are describing would be indiscriminate and would have the potential to be 2) much larger scale and therefor you could deduce the 3) intention of your hypothetical attacker would not be to cause disruptions of productivity withing a particular industry, but rather to prank random strangers. The difference is rather obvious.
