"According to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s 2015 “Worldwide Threat Assessment” report, Russia and China are the "most sophisticated nation-state actors” in the new generation of cyberwarfare, and Russian hackers lead in terms of sophistication, programming power and inventiveness. “The threat from China is overinflated, while the threat from Russia is underestimated,” says Jeffrey Carr, head of Web security consultancy Taia Global and author of the book Inside Cyber Warfare. “The Russians are the most technically proficient. For instance, we believe that Russian hackers-for-hire were responsible for the Sony attack.”"


http://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/15/russias-greatest-weapon-may-be-its-hackers-328864.html

The style was foreign and had lots of European references that most Americans would not get.

IMHO...

Not.

But then I doubt the hack would have happened at all if the Admins had chosen at the beginning to use the highly successful and commercial vBulletin forum software.

I would wager it was a disaffected, former DUer. The hatred there is blinding, really.

wait, no it isn't. I don't log many hours at DU so I don't know the various skill levels. I *have* seen some really deep hatred toward this site and many on it, like obsessive stuff. Seriously dark.

Over an anonymous, pretty insignificant discussion board. I can only envy them the time they have to invest but not the limited scope of their minds.

Wouldn't surprise me if this troll wasn't actually based in US.

so I don't want to speculate too much.

But one obvious initial suspect that just about anybody would consider would be Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. weev: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev