To go by Brent Lang’s yaddah-yaddah 12.9 Variety report, it’ll be damn hard to pin responsibility for the Sony hacking on North Korea and hey, nobody really knows for sure what really happened, right? What squishy, equivocating crap. If you ask me yesterday’s analysis by The Verge‘s Russell Brandom is the piece to go by. He says flat-out that “the pileup of evidence has led many observers (including me) to conclude that North Korea is almost certainly behind the attacks [although] it’s unlikely that we’ll get any evidence that’s more definitive than what we already have.”

North Korean factor #1: Two days ago Bloomberg reported that one of the core IP addresses involved in leaking the Sony files belongs to the private network of the St. Regis Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.” Plus there’s evidence, Brandom says, that “the attackers were aligned with North Korea.”

North Korean factor #2: “Whoever is behind the attacks has a specific grudge against Sony, and is more interested in revenge than making money or gathering information,” Brandom observes. “After the public spat over The Interview — which came with specific warnings of retaliation — it’s hard to think of anyone but North Korea that fits the profile. The North Korean government has also issued a string of less-than-convincing denials, ranging from an early ‘wait and see‘ to a more recent statement in which a spokesman called the hack an ‘act of justice,’ denying official involvement but admitting that it may have been carried out by the country’s supporters.”

North Korean factor #3: “Previous evidence [indicates] the specific program that wiped Sony’s computers was written in Korean. The attack also bears a striking resemblance to previous North Korean attacks, in both the specific details of the code and the previously unknown hacker group claiming responsibility. Bloomberg points to three previous attacks linked to North Korea that purported to be from previously unknown activist groups, one of which actually shares a server with the current attack.”