Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ News / World/  North Korea threatens bigger pain if punished over Sony hack
BackBack

North Korea threatens bigger pain if punished over Sony hack

Pyongyang threatens to target White House, Pentagon; US calls for restraint, compensation for Sony

A file photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Photo: KCNA via KNS via AFPPremium
A file photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Photo: KCNA via KNS via AFP

Seoul: North Korea warned that any US punishment over the hacking attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment would lead to damage “thousands of times greater", with targets including the White House and Pentagon.

The US takes such threats “very seriously," though it has “no specific credible threat information that lends credence" to them, US state department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters on Monday in Washington.

Calling on North Korea to “exercise restraint" in its reactions, Harf said the regime should admit its culpability in the cyberattack “and compensate Sony for the damages that they caused."

Hackers including the “Guardians of Peace" group that forced Sony to pull a comedy about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “are sharpening bayonets not only in the US mainland but in all other parts of the world," the Kim-led National Defense Commission said in a statement published on Sunday by the official Korean Central News Agency. Even so, North Korea doesn’t know who the Guardians are, the commission said.

“North Korea would never admit it is responsible for the Sony hacking," Kim Jin Moo, a North Korea researcher at South Korea’s state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, said by phone. “It can’t afford consequences like being put back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Yet it has to make sure its threat is taken seriously."

Terror list

US President Barack Obama said over the weekend that he would review whether the US should put the North back on the terror list, speaking in an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley. Former US president George W. Bush’s administration took North Korea off the list in 2008 after being on it for 20 years amid efforts to negotiate limits on the regime’s nuclear-weapons program.

The attack on Sony computers exposed Hollywood secrets, destroyed company data and caused the studio to cancel the release of The Interview, a satire about two US journalists involved in a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plot to kill Kim Jong Un. Sony has said it’s looking for a new way to release the film after US theatre chains refused to show it over threats of violence.

Obama said last week that Sony had “suffered significant damage", and vowed to respond to North Korea “in a place and time and manner that we choose."

Internet outage

North Korea’s Internet has been hit with outages and is offline on Monday, according to a network-monitoring company. The country, which has four official networks connecting it to the Internet—all of which route through China—began experiencing intermittent problems on Sunday and on Monday went completely black, according to Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research in Hanover, New Hampshire.

North Korea is ready to confront the US in all areas including cyber-warfare, and has already entered “an unprecedented state of ultra-harsh counter-warfare," its National Defense Commission (NDC) said on Sunday without elaborating on what that means.

The targets of its counteraction will include the White House, the Pentagon and the US mainland, NDC said. “The just struggle to be waged by them across the world will bring achievements thousands of times greater than the hacking attack."

Such threats have long been commonplace for the North Korean regime, which often uses over-the-top rhetoric in its barrages of propaganda.

‘Boiled pumpkin’

In the past, the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency has denounced the former president of South Korea as a “rat". It has called Hillary Clinton a “funny lady" who is “by no means intelligent", and it compared the US mainland to “a boiled pumpkin" in threatening an attack that would turn it “into a living hell of appalling disasters".

Government spokesmen have bombarded North Koreans with denunciations of their enemies and paeans to their leaders since the nation’s founding in 1948.

Many of the country’s threats have lacked credibility, and some of its photos have been exposed as crude fakes. The North’s news agency has resorted to doctoring photos at times to exaggerate the regime’s military prowess.

North Korea on 20 December demanded that the US participate in a joint investigation into the Sony case, after rejecting the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s conclusion that it was behind the attack.

Malicious software in the Sony attack revealed links to malware previously used by North Koreans, the FBI said. The tools used also were similar to a cyberattack in March 2013 against South Korean banks and media organizations.

South Korea says North Korea operates a unit of elite hackers to disrupt enemy networks in the event of war and steal information from foreign computers. South Korea believes North Korea is behind at least six cyberattacks it has suffered since 2009. NDC on Sunday repeated its denial that it was responsible for those attacks. Bloomberg

Jordan Robertson in Washington contributed to this story.

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 23 Dec 2014, 01:18 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App