President Barack Obama
President Barack Obama has finally commented on
the Sony Pictures hack, which came as a result of the studio's latest
production, The Interview, which was slated to be released this month.
Following a series of threats from the hacking group, the company cancelled the movie release so as to prevent more leaks of confidential information and possible terrorist attack on American citizens.
Addressing the issue during a press conference on Friday, December 19, 2014, the U.S president said: "I
am sympathetic to the concerns that [Sony] faced. Having said all that,
yes, they made a mistake. We cannot have a society where a dictator
someplace else can start imposing censorship here in the United States.
That's not who we are. That’s not what America is."
He continues: "I'm
sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about liability,
but I wish they'd spoken to me first. I would've told them do not get
into a pattern in which you are intimidated by those kinds of criminal
attacks
"We can't start changing our
behaviours, any more then we'd stop going to football games because of
the possibility of a terrorist attack."
According to Us Weekly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also confirmed on Friday that North Korea was behind the hack.
"As
a result of our investigation, and in close collaboration with other
U.S. government departments and agencies, the FBI now has enough
information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible
for these actions," the statement read.
The
organization said it came to its conclusion based on three overarching
factors, the first being that the FBI linked malware used in the
security breach to the secluded state. "Technical analysis of the
data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other
malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For
example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption
algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks," the FBI wrote.
Second, the FBI saw that several IP addresses were directly linked to North Korea. "The
FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used
in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government
has previously linked directly to North Korea," the statement read. "For
example, the FBI discovered that several Internet protocol (IP)
addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated
with IP addresses that were hardcoded into the data deletion malware
used in this attack."
Finally, the FBI saw
that the tools that were used in the Sony attack had similarities to the
tools used in the March 2013 cyber attack against South Korea. "Separately,
the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyber attack in
March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which
was carried out by North Korea," the statement read.
Despite the FBI's conclusion, the North Korean government has denied any connection to the attacks.
"The
U.S. should bear in mind that it will face serious consequences in case
it rejects our proposal for joint investigation and presses for what it
called countermeasures while finding fault with," the spokesman said in a statement on Saturday, December 20, 2014, via the Associated Press. "We have a way to prove that we have nothing to do with the case without resorting to torture, as the CIA does."
The admission was made one day after the FBI confirmed that North Korea was behind the November 24, 2014, attacks against Sony.
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Friday, 6 March 2015
Sony Attack: Obama says cancellation of "The Interview" was a mistake..Following a series of threats from the hacking group, the company cancelled the movie release so as to prevent more leaks of confidential information and possible terrorist attack on American citizens.
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