See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.
It doesn't work like that. The vast majority of the time it's regular stupid people that are doing the heavy lifting (often unwittingly) for state actor operations.
So yes, security by obscurity works. It makes the state actor's job that much harder.
Everything that costs will cost to the degree that it costs. Putting the chocolate milk on the top shelf is enough to encourage children to buy less chocolate milk. The data you're talking about? The place I work at is the one doing the hard boots on the ground labor for aerial data, and from that perspective nothing is easy or free.
One can make great arguments about why people should have access to data notwithstanding all risks, but surely not that security by obscurity is mere illusion.
Is it really the default?
This gives off the same vibes. But this is Korea. They will probably give up in a month or so and move on to whatever else they think will help make them rich overnight.
But that's not the first time that a community is tagged "Chinese communists" and attacked as such. Now imagine if some maga/alt-right/whatever leaders asked their followers to attack the "communist" OpenStreetMap by injecting a bit of false data everyday. Could OSM defend itself as easily?
They aren't. Wikipedia has been taken over by special interest groups and political agencies for a long, long time now.
