What's the apology etiquette for accusing the wrong person – or in this case, country – for a cyber attack? Cue sassy teenage girl drawling, “awkwarrrd.” Investigators wrongly identified an IP address in China as the source of the nasty code that hit in South Korea, paralyzing tens of thousands of computers within banks and broadcasting companies. Turns out the Internet Protocol address actually belongs to one of the banks that was hacked – Nonghyup Bank.

Regulators mistook China for the origin of the attack because the IP address was used solely for the company's internal networks, and it happened to be identical to the public IP address in China.

The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) has (sort of) apologized for the false accusation. A KCC official, Lee Seung-Won stated, “We were careless in our efforts to double-check and triple-check.” He added, “We will now make announcements only if our evidence is certain.”

Though the attack, which shut down 32,000 computers appears to have come from within South Korea, investigators are still inclined to believe that the attack came from abroad. Hackers can easily manipulate locational data, and government officials and other investigators are targeting North Korea as a primary suspect.

Seoul officials hold North Korea responsible for six cyber attacks on their systems since 2009.

North Korea has been making itself clear as a menace to South Korea in recent weeks. The region has been threatening Seoul – and Washington – since punishing U.N. sanctions were imposed for Pyongyang's nuclear test that took place last February.

North Korea also holds Seoul and Washington responsible for its own Internet shutdown, which disrupted its network just last week. 

All three systems belong to the banks affected by the cyber attack in South Korea, but were fully functioning by Friday. The broadcasters, on the other hand, have not fully recovered, though they say none of their programs were impeded.