After stating on Thursday that the coordinated cyberattack on six leading South Korean firms this week had originated in China, South Korean investigators said on Friday that they had misidentified a Chinese internet protocol address as the source of the cyberattack.

Despite the fact that the investigators - comprising a joint team of government and private experts - still maintained that the coordinated cyberattack, which resulted in the shutting down of 32,000 computers on Wednesday, was carried out by hackers abroad, they clarified that they has erroneously stated on Thursday that a malicious code which spread through the Nonghyup Bank server was traced to a Chinese IP address.

In a Friday statement, the state-run Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said that the IP address actually belonged to one of the computers at the bank. The Commission further added that the IP address was used only for the internal network of the bank, and that it was fairly akin to a public Chinese address.

Acknowledging the South Korean investigators' misidentification of China as the origin of the cyberattack, KCC official Lee Seung-won said to reporters that the error was apparently a result of the investigators' haste in giving the public details on the search for a culprit; and added: "We were careless in our efforts to double-check and triple-check."