Since it allows much more fine grained control over data and resource access than contemporary popular systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security and the concept of "hollowing out the attack surface with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege" can't be mentioned often enough.
Some specific projects to mention are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(operating_system) ,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubes_OS
If these don't make it to the mainstream, it is the responsibility of FAANG companies that at least the concepts/mechanisms contained in them do, in other systems. To provide the world with a secure computing substrate.
Why do you think those governments are not just trying to make money? You should check how much crypto DPRK made from ransomware. Krebs and others wrote about it
But it doesn't mean you can't trace what exact crook did by correlating various signs. Plus, nation state crooks have more capability usually.
the recent Ministry of Defence, UK hack was blamed on China, but if you actually dig into it that’s just a hypothesis and it really could have been anyone. If this was happening straight after 9/11 we’d be blaming terrorists, etc.
The benefits have been greatly oversold by BigTech multimillion $$$ sales teams. They are lots of stories of bribery involving these contracts.
Assuming the source of the attribution is acting with pure intentions, it is usually a preponderance of (mostly circumstantial) evidence. Does the malware and MO look similar to past known attacks? Did they leave any localized strings in the binary file, if yes does that nation have an interest in hacking the target? Does the malware use a stack of 0-days and labour-intensive obfuscation techniques (indicating a large amount of resources)? Does the whole picture make sense when you put it all together?
The above is in an ideal world, in reality almost all attributions are political and based on almost nothing. Even if they were based on some other intelligence source, how could a random member of the public verify that?
On top of the difficulty of gathering evidence, there is an incentive alignment between the heads of hacked organizations and intelligence agencies. The hacked company will look better as the victim of a "cyberattack" or a "chinese cyberattack" then as the victim of "random.ransomware.0238023". The intelligence agency can get more funding and PR by proclaiming the same.
(1) How do you tell a state actor from just hackers looking to make money?
(2) Is this a solvable problem?
I can't imagine most state agencies, hospitals, doctors offices, small businesses, being able to afford good experienced IT staff. I can't imagine outsourcing it to nearly any company and trusting that company. Exceptions might be Google or Apple but neither company provides more than email/docs/spreadsheets. They don't supply bookkeeping, appointments, medical record management, etc... and AFAICT, all the suppliers for those kinds of services have terrible security practices. And, even if Apple and Google could do a good job there's still social engineering.