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yarp writes:

The Guardian is reporting that the US government seems convinced of North Korean involvement in the recent Sony hacks, and has today imposed further sanctions against the country.

Despite some continued claims from outside the US government that the hack may have been the work of disgruntled employees instead, the White House on Friday followed through on its threat to seek revenge, blaming the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for “provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions and policies, particularly its destructive and coercive cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment”.

Scott Borg writing for CNBC has some alternative theories:

North Korea regularly carries out cyber attacks, but these attacks have always been relatively crude. Groups that monitor North Korea's cyber activities have never seen any sign that North Korea is currently a serious cyber threat or on the verge of becoming one.

The cyber attacks carried out against Sony required a much higher level of skill than North Korea could manage as recently as last spring.

[...] Here are some of the possibilities:

1) A criminal enterprise, perhaps ethnically Russian, that wants to confuse anyone investigating its extortion attempt by dragging in North Korea.
2) A group of criminal cyber attackers, perhaps South Korean, who have been mistaken for North Korea, because they simply used some of the same generally available attack tools and servers that North Korea would have used.
3) Ideologically-motivated hackers in Western countries who hate Sony and feel a common cause with anyone else who is Sony's enemy, including North Korea.
4) Former employees who want to hurt Sony and who figured they could add to Sony's woes by stirring up a conflict between Sony and a foreign government, such as North Korea.
5) Any group that wants the United States to take a harder line with North Korea, including many South Koreans, Japanese, and others in East and Southeast Asia.

Borg concludes the article:

The list of possibilities grows larger, the more you think about it. Even more possibilities emerge when you consider that different groups could have cooperated in the attacks, and that the same attackers might have had more than one motive.

Does this make the proposals in the media for making North Korea pay for these attacks sound more than a little naïve? Welcome to the world of cyber conflict! We all better get used to it, because this is what faces us in the year ahead.