For a missile defense professional I find it odd you've never heard of "Left of Launch." I think you should approach all of the defense industry folks and generals and admirals who oversee ballistic missile defense research and development and tell them they are wasting their time on this concept. You must share your vast knowledge with them! But I digress....
Interesting that you seem to have left out one very interesting quote from that article. Allow me:
To be sure, The New York Times could not confirm the impact of U.S. sabotage efforts; building and testing ballistic missiles is tricky business, and accidents happen whether the U.S. has its thumb on the scales or no. Nevertheless, the use of cyber-espionage to disrupt the development of foreign ballistic missile systems, in particular, raises some difficult questions about nuclear deterrence.
In other words, this is primarily speculation. Nothing can be confirmed other than there was some attempt at sabotage. And they are not even sure where it was done, or if it did any good. And there are some other major differences between the capabilities of say North Korea (which is at most a minor threat), and Russia or China (which are major threats).
Like the US, Russia has a missile system that was primarily created in-house, with systems that were created by and for the missile system specifically. China has largely copied this model as well, having acquired various pieces of technology but having the resources and infrastructure to create their own system.
Also, much of this infrastructure is old, Decades old. It quite often predates the modern Internet, and even anything but the most basic networked computers (more closely resembling the mainframe-terminal configuration than what we know of today as a computer network).
Iran and North Korea however do not have that ability however. Their program is largely based upon COTS components that have been acquired and re-purposed to fit their needs. For example, Iran did not build their own centrifuges and control systems to enrich uranium. They bought them on the open market. Stuxnet in fact was rather interesting.
In order for it to work, it required a controlling system using Windows to be running, controlling automated machinery with a control language created by Siemens, and also working with control motors made by a company in Finland (and an identical clone motor made in Iran). This shows the amount of dependence these systems have on components not only from outside sources, but in how hard they worked to make even their home made components exact duplicates. So much so that they were vulnerable to code designed to infect only the original manufactured items.
If Iran had been dependent upon a single one of these major components made in-house, this would never have worked. But they could not do that, they were dependent upon imported technology, which left them vulnerable.
Now you can not go around switching up the topic here. Is it missile defense, or defense only against threats from Iran and North Korea? Because at the most, those are only a pimple on the butt of an elephant compared to the threat from Russia and China.
And neither of those nations would be open to compromise in anywhere near the same way.
And it is interesting to note, that although NK has had setbacks in the early days of both their warhead and missile tests, this was completely to be expected. And in many ways, they have progressed much faster than we did in developing the same technology.
Our own first men in space in fact flew aboard essentially modified nuclear missiles. NASA had such a bad run of designing and building rockets that they were not trusted. So they turned to the Army and the Redstone nuclear SRBM for the Mercury program.
