The thing about H1B; it's not necessarily cheaper to hire them. What they represent is a workforce that can't complain about salary, can't leave your employ, can't offend you in any way - or the hard work is wasted, you can sack them, and they are instantly deported. Hot diggety, you've got indentured servants! No-lip super service with a smile. A gentile sort of slavery, without the actual chains.

Worked fine for them the last 25 years. No doubt a raise in the number of H1B visa/indentured servants permitted into the US is on the table soon.

Nope. MBAs are running the companies. It's rule by con artists who pretend to know more than economists, engineers, sociologists and politicians. They are creating a world without a functioning middle class - a feature, not a bug.

They are looking for under-29, preferably under-25, recently graduated PhDs with 15 years experience in _______, _______, ________, and _____________, dress like bankers, require no training, and will work 60+ hours a week for about fourteen dollars an hour. As independent contractors. From India. With visas that make them essentially voiceless indentured servants. In Bismark, North Dakota.

Not their fault that the talent pool is so limited.

I think the issue is that the more complex and sophisticated an attack, the more people you need, and then you run into an additional problem - for a criminal enterprise, the more people are involved, the more likely it is to be caught, either through carelessness or snitches.

So the "nation-state's backing" doesn't have to mean that a country's intelligence service is actively doing something, but just that they are sheltering and giving legal immunity to a group of civilian blackhats. And maybe free Mountain Dew.

Also, the deployment of this was apparently done using infected media physically planted on people or at the sites in multiple countries, so it would require some more resources than your typical spread-via-internet virus or worm.