Sharyl Attkisson is now claiming she doesn't know who was behind the hack of her computer, after writing in her book that her sources gave her “the name of the person responsible for my computer intrusions.”

Attkisson's former employer CBS News confirmed in June 2013 that her CBS-issued Toshiba laptop was compromised by an unknown party. Attkisson has since claimed that the hack was conducted by a government agency. She has not produced evidence of this, but she claims the Department of Justice's Inspector General is currently investigating her personal Apple computer.

During a November 5 interview with HuffPostLive, Attkisson was asked “how much do you think that it really is the administration doing this to you, or people within the government spying on you because of your reporting?” In response, Attkisson claimed she had evidence of a “government tie,” but did not know who or what organization had specifically conducted the cyberattack:

ATTKISSON: I can only tell you what the forensics shows. And I'm not a forensics expert. We've had three separate computer forensics exams by three different people that have showed highly sophisticated remote intrusion of my computers.

[...]

The forensics says that there was a government tie to this, because there was, as one of them said, proprietary software to one of the four federal government agencies. Doesn't mean I know who was on the other end or was it an organization or was it a person, a rogue person, I don't have the answer to those questions, I just know that there's that government tie. 

But in her new book Stonewalled, Attkisson writes that a source gave her the name of the individual responsible:

On May 6, 2013, I make contact with an excellent source who has crucial information: the name of the person responsible for my computer intrusions. He provides me the name and I recognize it. I'm not surprised. It strikes me as desperate and cowardly that those responsible would resort to these tactics. That's all I can say about that for now.

Two paragraphs later, a source code-named “Number One” tells Attkisson that the inspector general's office “works for the people who did this to you.” (In May 2013, the Justice Department said it had never compromised Attkisson's computers.)

Attkisson has also reversed herself on whether various technological problems she experienced in 2012 and 2013 were tied to the intrusion on her system. In the book, she suggested her phone, television, personal laptop, and cable systems had all malfunctioned due to the hacking by a government agency. But on November 4, she told radio host Don Imus that those “disruptions happening in my electrical systems at home may in the end have nothing to do with the intrusion.”

Challenged on that reversal during her HuffPostLive interview, Attkisson claimed:

I was trying to explain, because there were so many people anxious without full information, and I understand, to try to discredit and poke holes and controversialize all of this. And, I had heard it said mistakenly that if all of that stuff was just normal miss-wiring, which I don't believe it was, then nothing really happened. And I was making the point that take all of that aside, that was just a symptom that I saw that had nothing to do with the forensics which proved the remote intrusions. That was just the thing that triggered me and my sources to say, “something is indeed probably happening to you, let's take a look.” So even if you scoop those out, even if you want to say, I was holding my backspace key down or whatever they said, you have to look at the forensics from the three separate experts, and you really can't argue with that.

After Attkisson released a video she had taken that reportedly showed text from a Microsoft Word document on her laptop being erased, Media Matters asked computer security experts to review that video. Those experts said that rather than showing evidence of hacking, the video seemed to show her computer “malfunction[ing],” likely due to a stuck backspace key.

The epigraph of Stonewalled is “The truth eventually finds a way to be told.”

Watch Attkisson saying she didn't know who was responsible for the hack on HuffPostLive: