We’ll respond, Obama tells N. Korea

WASHINGTON, Saturday

US President Barack Obama has warned North Korea it will face retaliation for a crippling cyber attack on Sony Pictures over an irreverent film comedy that infuriated Pyongyang.

Obama on Friday said the movie giant had “made a mistake” in cancelling the Christmas Day release of “The Interview,” a madcap romp about a CIA plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

Sony defended its decision, made after anonymous hackers invoked the 9/11 attacks in threatening cinemas screening the film— prompting theatre chains to say they would not risk showing it.

An envoy for Pyongyang denied the secretive state was behind the hacking, which led to the release of a trove of embarrassing emails, scripts and other internal communications, including information about salaries and employee health records.

SOME DICTATOR

Addressing reporters after the FBI said Pyongyang was to blame, Mr Obama said Washington would never bow to “some dictator.”

“We can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack,” President Obama said.

“We will respond. We will respond proportionately and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.”

While the president said he was sympathetic to Sony’s plight, he also said: “Yes, I think they made a mistake.”

“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” he added.

Just before Mr Obama took the podium, the Federal Bureau of Investigation explained how it had concluded that North Korea was to blame.

The attackers used malware to break into the studio and render thousands of Sony Pictures computers inoperable, forcing the company to take its entire network offline, the FBI said.

It said analysis of the software tools used revealed links to other malware known to have been developed by “North Korean actors.”

The FBI also cited “significant overlap” between the attack and other “malicious cyber-activity” with direct links to Pyongyang, including an attack on South Korean banks carried out by North Korea.

“Such acts of intimidation fall outside the bounds of acceptable state behaviour,” the agency said in a statement.
There was “no evidence” that North Korea had acted in concert with another country, Mr Obama said, after reports that China — Pyongyang’s only ally — had possibly provided assistance.

Chinese state newspaper, the Global Times, lashed out at “The Interview” on Saturday as “senseless cultural arrogance” in an editorial.

Senior Republican lawmaker John McCain — the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — called the cyber attack an “act of war.”

And senior Democratic Senator Robert Menendez urged Secretary of State John Kerry to consider again designating Pyongyang a state sponsor of terrorism.

“This is an unacceptable act of international censorship which curtails global artistic freedom and, in aggregate, would seem to meet the definitions for acts of terrorism,” Menendez wrote to Kerry.

For his part, Obama referred to it as a “crime.”

Pyongyang’s mission to the United Nations firmly denied any involvement. “Our country has no relation with the hacker,” North Korean political counsellor Kim Song told AFP.

On Saturday, North Korea Foreign ministry called for a joint investigation into a crippling cyber attack.

“Without resorting to such tortures as were used by the US CIA, we have means to prove that this incident has nothing to do with us,” it said.