On Friday, the FBI issued its now-famous statement accusing the North. The agency, in that statement, did not attribute responsibility to any other state. Similarly, Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Daily Beast that he heard nothing about China’s complicity at a Friday classified briefing about the Sony incident.
President Obama himself weighed in on the issue. “We’ve got no indication that North Korea was acting in conjunction with another country,” he said in response to a question at his end-of-year press conference Friday.
So did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself, pull off the audacious attacks on its own?
The evidence suggests Beijing had to have been aware of North Korea’s hacking of Sony as soon as it began and was undoubtedly complicit in that crime.
Why? An intelligence official, speaking anonymously to Fox News this week, stated the “final stage of the attack” was launched outside North Korea. Ars Technica reports that the attacks originated from Chinese IP addresses.
Nonetheless, there is, at least in open sources at this time, insufficient information to make definitive conclusions about China as the origin of the hacking. Yet the preponderance of evidence indicates the hackers launched their raid from Chinese soil. As David Sanger of the New York Times stated on Wednesday in an article discussing what American officials knew about the incident, “Much of North Korea’s hacking is done from China.”
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