North Korea finally broke its silence on Sunday and denied allegations that it is behind the latest incident of hacking Sony Pictures. Nevertheless, officials consider it a "righteous deed."
"We do not know where in America Sony Pictures is situated and for what wrongdoings it became the target of the attack, nor (do) we feel the need to know about it," the statement carried in state media said. "But what we clearly know is that Sony Pictures is the very one which was going to produce a film abetting a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of North Korea."
An unidentified source from North Korea's National Defense Commission told the Associated Press that their government is not taking any responsibility against the hack, but believes that it "might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers" against the United States.
Late November, Sony Pictures reported that its servers were hacked and prevented its employees from accessing their company emails. The hackers also managed to release the DVD screener versions of new movies titled "Fury," "Annie," "Mr. Turner," "Still Alice" and "To Write Love on her Arms." "The Fury" is not even in theaters yet, but more than 1.2 million copies have already been downloaded.
Sony has hired FireEye's Mandiant Forensics to investigate the hack while their technicians continued to restore the servers. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also joined the probe. U.S. officials suspected North Korea is behind the attack because it coincided with the pending release of "The Interview," a Sony comedy about the CIA attempting to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
"North Korea can really do this kind of thing," said one official to the Los Angeles Times. "We're talking about a country that doesn't even have the lights on for most of their people but [has] the sophistication to do something like this."
Cybersecurity experts point to North Korea as the attack's author due to similarities in codes used in the Sony Pictures hack to ones used to attack South Korea last year.
