North Korea has a terrible education system and an entimated 1 in 10,000 people have access to the Internet in North Korea. This is not the kind of environment

North Korea has a terrible education system and an entimated 1 in 10,000 people have access to the Internet in North Korea. This is not the kind of environment that fosters elite super hackers. It's also not the kind of environment that fosters high-energy physicists, but we're talking about a regime that has indigenously developed nuclear weapons. The NK government already has an "official" Linux distro, "Red Star OS," indicating at least some level of technical ... well, let's not say prowess, let's say comprehension. (Likewise, the proliferation of cheap high-tech goods smuggled over the Chinese border has forced the NK government to announce its own smartphone, though few people believe the factory to be anything other than a Potemkin fab, with the actual phones shipped over from China.) You have to assume that a nation state, even one as impoverished as NK, can mobilize the kind of cash necessary to train a few hundred (at most) hackers, using Chinese or Russian instructors. It's much cheaper than hiring Makeyev OKB to design another ballistic missile system, and, unlike nuclear and missile tests, the international community doesn't have a unified playbook for dealing with target hacks, particularly against non-governmental systems. No one's going to war for Sony, but if NK is behind (or believed to be behind) the attack, you can bet that the USG has found Sony's experience to be rather bracing. Having said that, I agree that the evidence favoring NK as the culprit is circumstantial and hazy at best. Even the best evidence they're provided is dependent on a chain of assumptions that I think haven't been properly validated. This isn't a "WMD in Iraq" situation, because the USG would have loved for the Sony hack to be a bunch of anons doing it for the lulz (though now that the government has committed to the NK story, it's hard to backtrack). After all, we couldn't do much over NK's nuclear program, which is a crisis many, many orders of magnitude more serious than the Sony hack; calling out NK for this just underscores the fact that we don't have many levers to move against Pyongyang.