US-North Korea cyber war gets personal
Racially charged insults have been hurled at President Barack Obama
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Hawke’s Bay
North Korea has responded to recent internet outages by blaming them on the US and hurling racially charged insults at President Barack Obama.
This is the latest development in the hacking row involving the Sony Pictures’ satirical comedy The Interview about an assassination attack on dictator Kim Jung Un.
North Korea’s National Defence Commission has described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” the official Korean Central News Agency reports a spokesman as saying.
North Korea has denied involvement in a crippling cyber-attack on Sony Pictures but has expressed fury over the comedy.
Sony Pictures initially called off the release of the film, citing threats of terror attacks against US movie theatres. After widespread criticism, including from President Obama, the movie was released in several hundred independent theatres. It was also released online to US customers only.
The outages happened after President Obama blamed the Sony hack on North Korea and promised to respond “in a place and time and manner that we choose.”
The US government has declined to say whether it was behind the internet shutdowns in North Korea. The latest was rep[orted at the weekend.
According to the North Korean commission’s spokesman, “the US, a big country, started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea], not knowing shame like children playing tag.”
Meanwhile, FBI has reiterated its belief North Korea is behind the Sony hacking attacks dismissed theories that it could be Russia or other entities.
"Attribution to North Korea is based on intelligence from the FBI, the US intelligence community, DHS [Department for Homeland Security], foreign partners and the private sector. There is no credible information to indicate that any other individual is responsible for this cyber incident," it says.
Nevil Gibson
Mon, 29 Dec 2015
Mon, 29 Dec 2015
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US-North Korea cyber war gets personal
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