They busted some North Korean IT workers but how will they prevent this in the future? What are US companies doing to protect themselves?

Misleading. Release from June. Why now OP?

Some discussion at the time:

US Government takes down major North Korean 'remote IT workers' operation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44428422

This leads to some interesting questions. Were the people on the North Korean side working given access to more information about the world than the average citizen?

I would have to imagine they have to know more just to be able to interact normally with other people. I would think at some point in a meeting a casual conversation about current events would come up and if they did not know much about the outside world it would be a very weird (and likely raising some red flags) conversation.

Or were these interactions only ever over text, so no camera or anything which would help obfuscate that. It would also minimize the chance of there being those more causal human conversations.