Hacking Attacks Between Nations is Difficult to Prove

It is a story that is becoming all-too-familiar: the US government had to admit on Thursday that one of its key personnel databases, containing the records of up to four million staff, had been compromised in a large-scale hacking attack. Officials speaking off the record laid the blame at China’s door, though did not immediately provide any evidence for this claim. The Office of Personnel Management attack is merely the latest of a slew of high-profile hacking attacks. Within the last few months, State Department officials had to abandon their email systems for several weeks after a long-term hack was discovered, while Sony executives spent a miserable few weeks watching their internal emails get reported across the world after their own attack. But everything about such attacks is murky; finding the perpetrators is difficult if not impossible, as the architecture of the internet allows for hackers to mask their attack through unwitting users and anonymization software.