The United States would respond proportionately to a North Korea cyber attack that damaged Sony Pictures Entertainment, Barack Obama, US President has promised.
The American President stated this after the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Pyongyang was responsible for the cyber attack.
“We will respond. We will respond proportionately and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. We cannot have a society in which some dictator in some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Obama told an end-of-year news conference at the White House on Friday.
Obama also said that Sony Pictures Entertainment made a mistake by canceling the release of the movie, The Interview, a satirical film about a plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader.
“Sony is a corporation, they suffered significant damage, there were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake. In this interconnected digital world, there are going to be opportunities for hackers to engage in cyber assaults both in the private sector and in the public sector,” he said.
The FBI said North Korea was responsible for the destructive cyber attack and vowed it would hunt down the perpetrators and make them pay.
Such acts of intimidation fall outside the bounds of acceptable state behavior, FBI said in a statement adding it would identify, pursue, and impose costs and consequences on individuals, groups, or nation states who use cyber means to threaten the United States or US interests.
The FBI’s investigation cited, among other factors, technical similarities between the Sony break-in and past malicious cyber activities linked directly to North Korea.
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