But security researchers have noticed a similarity between an earlier version of WannaCry and a hacking tool used by the Lazarus Group. President Brad Smith confirmed what researchers already widely concluded: the attack made use of a hacking tool built by the U.S. National Security Agency that had leaked online in April. The Lazarus group was linked to the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures and attacks on banks around the world.
On this, the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab's researcher Kurt Baumgartner said, "Neel Mehta's discovery is the most significant clue to date regarding the origins of WannaCrypt".
Researchers have said that some of the code used in Friday's ransomware, known as WannaCry software, was almost identical to the code used by the Lazarus Group, a group of North Korean hackers who used a similar version for the devastating hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 and the last year's hack of Bangladesh Central Bank.
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Another possible slip-up: Nicholas Weaver, who teaches networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley, said good ransomware usually generates a unique bitcoin address for each payment to make tracing hard.
The two companies said they needed to study the code more and asked for others to help with the analysis.
Some eight to 10 US entities, including a few in the health-care sector, reported possible WannaCry infections to the Department of Homeland Security, a USA official said.
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Other researchers agree. "Right now, there is no clear indication of the first compromise for WannaCry", said Mr Budiman Tsjin of RSA Security, a part of Dell.
There are other surprises that suggest this is not an ordinary ransomware attack.
He poured fuel on a long-running debate over how government intelligence services should balance their desire to keep software flaws secret - in order to conduct espionage and cyberwarfare - against sharing those flaws with technology companies to better secure the internet. "That's the attribution that we're after right now", he said at a White House briefing.
So far only a few victims of the attack appeared to have paid, based on publicly available bitcoin accounts on the web, where victims have been instructed to pay.
In the WannaCry attack, which started Friday, the attackers have demanded $300 per computer in payments to unlock infected computers, a scheme that paralyzed computers at United Kingdom hospitals, a Spanish telephone company, and European auto factories. It has got the finger from Kaspersky, which sees potential links between its means and methods and those of the Lazarus Group, which is a known North Korean operation.
A blog post claiming to have been written by the ShadowBrokers group promised from June to release tools every month to anyone willing to pay for access to some of the tech world's biggest commercial secrets. It's the strongest theory yet as to the origin of WannaCry, but there are also details that arguably point away from it being the work of North Korea. But law enforcement and researchers can use this information to see what future attacks might look like so companies and users can defend themselves against hacks.
The attack is unique, according to Europol, because it combines ransomware with a worm function, meaning once one machine is infected, the entire internal network is scanned and other vulnerable machines are infected.
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