North Korea Denies Involvement In Sony Hacks, Loses The Internet

The Korean Central News Agency, the official media arm of the government of North Korea (DPRK), has released a statement explicitly denying any role in the costly, extensive hacks against Sony Pictures Entertainment — which ostensibly occurred over the planned release of political comedy The Interview — before the country itself lost its link to the internet.

On Sunday, the Policy Department of the National Defence Commission of DPRK discussed of the "surprisingly sophisticated, destructive and threatening cyber warfare" executed against Sony Pictures, seemingly revelling in the country being "thrown into a bottomless quagmire after suffering property losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars". (Side note, show us one other media outlet in the world that regularly calls the US names such as "the ill-famed cess-pool of injustice".)

However, despite its apparent glee at Sony and the US's misfortunes — and especially the former's action in cancelling the movie's release — the statement outwardly dismisses any allegation that North Korea itself was involved in the attacks.

"Those who meted out a stem punishment of justice were reported to be cyber experts styling themselves 'guardians of peace', the KCNA's statement said.

"The NDC of the DPRK highly estimates the righteous action taken by the 'guardians of peace', though it is not aware of their residence," it continued. "It, at the same time, consideres as fortunate the step taken by the Sony Pictures Entetainment to give up the overall distribution of the above-said movie due to the decision and strong pressure of the movie and drama distributors for stopping the screening of the reactionary movie, though belatedly."

The lengthy statement goes on to describe the FBI's consequent claims of evidence that North Korea was behind the attacks as "groundless".

"No matter how big and disgraceful the loss may be, the US should not pull up others for no reason," the statement read.

By yesterday, however, North Korea had lost its connection to the internet. As the New York Times reports, the country suffered "one of the worst … network failures in years" after President Barack Obama on Friday announced that the US would be launching a response to the cybervandalism enacted against Sony Pictures. Although the US is not demonstrably responsible for the outage — a competing theory is that China's state-owned telecom, China Unicom, has the power and resources to easily block the DPRK's access to the internet — though State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf did tell reporters: "We aren't going to discuss, you know,  publicly operational details about the possible response options … as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen."

Governmental response is not the only activity bubbling away in the wake of the hacks and eventual pulling of The Interview, however — there were plans for some theatres to screen 2005's Team America: World Police in place of the canned film, though those were soon scuttled by Paramount, while New York's Treehouse Theater is planning to hold a free live reading of The Interview this weekend (from "a screenplay that I believe was the shooting script … [but] not a transcript of the final movie," Treehouse Theater's artistic director, Rob Reese, said).

Add that to a recent assertion from Sony Pictures Entertainment lawyer David Boies that the film has only been postponed — despite earlier statements from the company that it had no further plans to release it — and the odds are slowly swinging back in favour of the idea that, despite everything, we may see James Franco and Seth Rogen's embattled feature in some capacity after all.