The official narrative holds that agents of the North Korean government infiltrated Sony Pictures’ corporate network and used that attack as leverage to stop the release of a Seth Rogen film. While that might make a good Seth Rogen movie, it hardly seems plausible given what is currently known.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to take a skeptical view of the official narrative. Yet only the most conspiratorial would claim the attack was fabricated. Somebody infiltrated the Sony network. The question remains: Who done it?

Over at New York Magazine, Margaret Hartmann offers four alternative culprits:

1. A disgruntled former employee. There are many ways to make money from this intrusion but the attacker(s) chose instead to embarrass the company.
2. Hacktivists. This was a high profile breach largely because the intruders contacted and taunted Sony executives in the press. Their behavior more closely resembles Anonymous or LulzSec than a nation state.
3. The Chinese. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant has been hired to investigate the breach. They’ve investigated so many Chinese attacks that they’ve become the firm’s specialty.
4. Everybody. There’s overlap in all these theories and it’s possible the answer is D.) All of the above.

Regular readers know Your JoeDog subscribes to “All of the above” or as he put it, “everybody and his sister.” For a successful attack on a corporate network to generate maximum LULZ, bragging must occur. It’s very likely somebody breached the network and provided details that enabled successive visitors to play inside the breach.