What's the salary for a software engineer in urban China? 60-80k/yr USD? Two years of that salary is cheaper than a good single shoulder fired missile. Seems like a pretty cheap attack vector to me. A Javelin is a quarter million per pop and they can only hit one target.

Yeah, exactly - when your army is measured in the millions, picking n hundred with technical aptitude is basically a rounding error.

They are paid much less than that. However, American weapons are also far overpriced due to high labor costs, among other things. The Chinese probably have cheaper weapons.

Unless the payment is performed by foreign entity (which means a US employer is hiring a Chinese hacker), it's not a wise choice to do currency exchange when measuring salary, because it would erase other facts affecting salary, like CPI or housing price.

Apart from (both visible and invisible) taxes, I expect a senior programmer would earn ~500-700k CNY per year. Game programmers may reach up to 200k. For a team able to perform such attack, 1M/yr avg. might be reasonable.

But if this is not a state-sponsored attack, I can't find enough interest. And, if this is state-backed...contractor or some dishonest officials would a huge part, so the real cost might be >2M/yr. Considering you can get nothing during 2 year's lurking I doubt if it's feasible enough.

If I were doing it, I'd have a number of these "burner committers" ready to go when needed.

If I were doing it AND amoral, I'd also be willing to find and compromise committers in various ways.