The FBI Friday officially blamed North Korea for the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment (NYSE:SNE), but there is mounting pressure on the White House to take tough action in response.
North Korea called President Barack Obama “a monkey” and blamed the U.S. Saturday for shutting down its Internet. Pyongyang also has denied involvement in the cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment (NYSE:SNE), which agreed to a limited release of a comedy “The Interview” depicting an assassination of its leader Kim Jong Un.
Sony Pictures initially called off the release citing threats of terror attacks against U.S. movie theaters, which Obama criticized. The movie opened this week and drew large crowds despite only being shown in some 300 theaters across the country.
On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of The Interview and called it illegal, dishonest and reactionary.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” said an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department in a statement cited by the official Korean Central News Agency.
It wasn’t the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama. In May, the state-run news agency said Obama has the “shape of a monkey.” The defense commission also accused Washington for intermittent outages of websites in the North last week, which happened after the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack.
However, the U.S. government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.
According to the North Korean commission’s spokesman, “the U.S., 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 a tag.”
The commission threatened the U.S. with consequences, though offered no details.
North Korea and the U.S. remain technically in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not an actual peace treaty. The U.S. stations roughly 28,500 troops in South Korea from the 2nd Infantry Division among others, as deterrence against North Korean aggression.
