I'm definitely skeptical that NK is behind it for the simple reason of who benefits from that narrative. Obviously it sounds better for Sony if they were hacked by a rogue state rather than a handful of disgruntled individuals. The media loves a good story and is ecstatic to whip this up into a major political frenzy, dragging in the US government and whomever else they can in order to drive page views. NK wants more than anything to be taken seriously and feared; so even if they deny it you can't see them being too upset about the allegations.
It seems to me interests are aligning in a perfect storm here, and that makes me very very skeptical. That doesn't mean I firmly believe they weren't involved, but just that I don't think we have any reasonable chance of getting at the truth.
In this context the two narratives of "north korea did it, okay?" and "perhaps one of the 8,000 laid off tech department workers at Sony did it" are easy to understand.
Sony's multiple layoffs of its digital unit workers gave certain employees time to orchestrate this.
And on the cry wolf side, the big 3 American media companies started going down their own rabbit hole of speculation and fear mongering.
Do you remember the last time (if ever) any of these "News Outlets" have rescinded their accusations (especially regarding 'war') after making such strong accusations for so long ?
These two narratives are not mutually exclusive. NK could easily have hired one of these people. I don't know who carried it out but I'm 99% sure I know who is behind it.
And how confident are you that this isn't the Dunning–Kruger effect in action?
I'm struggling to see how you don't see the irony or hypocrisy in what you are saying.
Now that is absurd.
Then talk came up of it being related to the movie (in the Press, or from Sony), and unsurprisingly, the next contacts suggested that the movie had something to do with it.
The original group also seems to have said that they did not send threats to Sony employees after the docs were uploaded, and the contact to the movie theaters was different than that to Sony.
Unfounded basis? Possibly, but no more unfounded than the assumptions being made, which basically amount to "Last saturday, a black Ford Fiesta was involved in a bank robbery, driven by a guy wearing black pants and a blue top. Today, I saw a black Ford Fiesta with a guy wearing black pants and a blue top, he must be going to rob a bank".
Fairly nice timeline here https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2puo8h/bittorrent...
Source for the original email, a plain extortion http://mashable.com/2014/12/08/hackers-emailed-sony-execs/
Other sources for skeptical views: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sony-hack-skeptics,news-20037.ht... http://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is...
The original group deny the threats: http://recode.net/2014/12/08/sony-hacker-leaks-more-internal...
The alleged initial group also says here it is not about the movie: http://www.csoonline.com/article/2853893/disaster-recovery/f...
My reading of it is that it is not 1 attack, but several different ones (no surprise given Sonys crappy security), and people are assuming it is all one group, and taking the first option given to be the actual one, as, let's face it, the group behind it is unlikely to ever be caught, and during this whole thing, since Sony bought up the fact they thought it was about the movie, NK has been low hanging fruit as an obvious choice.
The real question is: why are these "experts" - including some here on HN - taking such extreme and unfounded positions on this? I think it's quite likely that they didn't do the hacking themslves. Perhaps they paid members of Lulzsec to do this on their behalf. But to deny that NK is behind this is absurd and makes the whole security community look crazier than Kim Jong-Un.