The FBI officially announced Friday that it believes North Korea to be the perpetrator behind the recent hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The security breach, which involved the theft of screeners and employee information, occurred Nov. 24. Since then, law enforcement officials have been on the hunt to pinpoint who is behind the hacking group calling themselves "Guardians of Peace." Along with leaking scripts and screeners for upcoming movies, the hackers also released social security numbers and emails of 50,000 current and former Sony employees onto the Internet.

Evidence began mounting that the attacks originated from North Korea, and while the country quickly denied that it was behind them, North Korea also blasted a now-canceled Sony film, "The Interview." The attack, North Korea said, was a "a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers" in a "just struggle" against the United States and its imperialistic policies.

After nearly one month, however, the FBI states that it has enough evidence to point the finger at North Korea, partly due to the following reasons:

1) Technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks.

2) The FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea. For example, the FBI discovered that several Internet protocol (IP) addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hardcoded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.

3) Separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyber attack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea.

North Korea denied the charges Friday but chose to once again condemn "The Interview."

"It defamed the image of our country. It made a mockery of our sovereignty. We reject it," Kim Song, a North Korean diplomat to the United Nations, told The Associated Press. "But there is no relation (to the hacking)."

"The Interview," starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, follows the exploits of two journalists who score an interview with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, played by Randall Park. The comedians lampoon North Korea's leader, a statement seen by North Korea in real life as an aggressive attack by Americans on their beloved leader.

Subsequent controversy, along with terrorist threats, have caused Sony and major theater chains to drop the movie, a move that President Obama said on Friday was a "mistake" due to the implication that the United States would cave into terrorist threats.

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