WASHINGTON — The U.S. government was not responsible for crippling North Korea’s Internet infrastructure after President Barack Obama blamed the country for hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., two senior U.S. officials said.
Congress announced Friday it will examine North Korea’s cyberthreats starting next week.
In a new interview, the movie studio’s chief executive, Michael Lynton, compared the sensational hacking against Sony Pictures to burning down the company. He revealed that the studio’s network was still down more than six weeks later and was expected to remain that way for weeks longer.
“They came in the house, stole everything, then burned down the house,” Lynton said. “They destroyed servers, computers, wiped them clean of all the data and took all the data.”
The Obama administration has blamed North Korea for hacking Sony but has been coy about whether it retaliated and caused North Korea’s outage, which affected all the nation’s Internet connections starting the weekend of Dec. 20.
Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to openly discuss the issue, acknowledged that it was not a U.S. operation.
It was not clear even within the administration whether rogue hackers or other governments disrupted North Korea’s networks. Service was sporadic starting Dec. 20, then collapsed entirely for nearly 10 hours two days later.
