US investigators are said to be closing in on the source of the cyber attacks that hit a number of US companies, including Google, earlier this year. The BBC and Financial Times are both reporting that Stateside officials have tracked the author of the code used to attack the company.

The attacks – which led to Google announcing that they were thinking of pulling out of China altogether – are said to have originated from a Chinese “freelance security consultant in his 30s” who had published extracts of the attack code on the web.

The hacker is believed to have used a security hole in Internet Explorer to launch the attacks (which hit more than 30 companies), though thankfully the hole has since been patched.

The alleged hacker posted pieces of the program to a hacker’s forum and that Chinese officials had “special access” to the code. “If he wants to do the research he’s good at, he has to toe the line now and again,” the paper quoted a single, unnamed government researcher as saying.

The news comes after reports had linked two Chinese schools to the attacks. Reports suggested that the source of the strikes had been traced to Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang School, a large vocational training centre in Jinan, though both schools deny any involvement.