The revelation comes from a trove of documents recently discovered by US researchers inside a computer server housed in North Korea. It’s unclear how the files ended up in this tightly controlled portion of the internet, but the researchers who analyzed them told CNN they appear to be the result of work that was unknowingly outsourced to North Korean workers.
That’s a lot of words to avoid saying a system was hacked or broken into. Call it what it is.
“Hacking” has become too broad a term, with a lingering air of malicious intent. In my opinion, those extra words avoid accusation and assumption.
I think they’re saying that it isn’t clear what the outsourcing chain was that led to North Koreans doing this animation work.
Hacking has lost all meaning though, case in point that public official from Minnesota who accused a journalist of “hacking” because the journalist opened up their browser dev tools pane and looked at the client side code.
It wouldn't be the first time. SEK studio also did an episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender (The Awakening) and Futurama: Bender's Big Score, from foreign studios further outsourcing to them.