North Korea Threatens White House and Pentagon If Punished for Sony Hack
North Korea warned that any U.S. punishment over the hacking attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment would lead to damage “thousands of times greater,” with targets including the White House and Pentagon.
The U.S. takes such threats “very seriously,” though it has “no specific credible threat information that lends credence” to them, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters today in Washington.
Calling on North Korea to “exercise restraint” in its reactions, Harf said the regime should admit its culpability in the cyber-attack “and compensate Sony for the damages that they caused.”
Hackers including the “Guardians of Peace” group that forced Sony to pull a comedy about the assassination of Kim Jong Un “are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world,” the Kim-led National Defense Commission said in a statement published yesterday by the official Korean Central News Agency. Even so, North Korea doesn’t know who the Guardians are, the commission said.
“North Korea would never admit it is responsible for the Sony hacking,” Kim Jin Moo, a North Korea researcher at South Korea’s state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, said by phone. “It can’t afford consequences like being put back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Yet it has to make sure its threat is taken seriously.”