The statement’s choice of language is unlikely to improve relations between the U.S. and North Korea in the wake of the extensive Sony hack and the release of The Interview on Christmas Day. President Obama has not yet responded to the claims from North Korea but has previously said he holds Kim Jong-un’s administration responsible for the act of cyber vandalism.
Some of North Korea’s internal and external networks collapsed again on Saturday night, according to reports from the country, after experiencing a variety of problems over the last few days. “[The latest outage] could have been something as routine as maintenance or it could have been a continuation of the things we saw in the past week, which looked more like attacks,” Jim Cowie of the Dyn Research monitoring firm told Reuters.
On December 19 the FBI confirmed that it believes hackers working on behalf of the North Korean government were responsible for the data leaks suffered by Sony, an accusation that has been rebuffed by the East Asian nation. A number of security experts have weighed in to cast doubt on the FBI’s version of events but the U.S. administration seems sure of its convictions.
“The United States, with its large physical size and oblivious to the shame of playing hide and seek as children with runny noses would, has begun disrupting the Internet operations of the main media outlets of our republic,” read North Korea’s most recent statement, which also called for the U.S. to provide proof of its culpability for the recent Sony hacks.
