The identity of the hackers remains unclear, said the report. However, their degree of technical sophistication was so substantial that forensic investigators suspect that a state actor was behind the espionage operation, according to the Associated Press. The news agency relayed an email message it received from United Nations spokesman Rupert Colville, which claimed that the hackers did penetrate the OHCHR system but “did not get very far, [as] nothing confidential was compromised”.

But the above statement appears to contradict the leaked study, which suggests that the cyber-espionage operation against the United Nations resulted in a compromise of “core infrastructure components” that were “determined to be serious”. Among the accounts that were compromised by the hackers were those of some domain administrators, who have access to large segments of the United Nations’ computer networks. The Associated Press spoke to an anonymous United Nations official, who said that the attack was “sophisticated”, and that the organization’s computer systems were “reinforced” in the months following the incident.