The Motion Picture Association of America’s chariman and CEO, senator Chris Dodd, has called North Korea’s cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment “deplorable” and “despicable,” while expressing disappointment in “a lot of the media coverage.”
The statement comes just minutes after the FBI formally named the communist country as the culprit behind the Sony hack attack.
“The FBI’s announcement that North Korea is responsible for the attack on Sony Pictures is confirmation of what we suspected to be the case: that cyberterrorists, bent on wreaking havoc, have violated a major company to steal personal information, company secrets and threaten the American public,” Dodd said. “It is a despicable, criminal act.”
“Disappointingly, that fact has been lost in a lot of the media coverage of this over the past few weeks,” Dodd continued. “This situation is larger than a movie’s release or the contents of someone’s private emails. This is about the fact that criminals were able to hack in and steal what has now been identified as many times the volume of all of the printed material in the Library of Congress and threaten the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who work in the film and television industry, as well as the millions who simply choose to go to the movies.”
He added: “The Internet is a powerful force for good and it is deplorable that it is being used as a weapon not just by common criminals, but also, sophisticated cyber terrorists. We cannot allow that front to be opened again on American corporations or the American people.”
The crippling cyberattack began on November 24, resulting in terabytes of private company data being released online. A subsequent threat against theaters planning to show “The Interview” on Christmas Day led Sony to cancel the release of film at the center of the hack.
The FBI said it concluded North Korea’s involvement by studying “infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. Government has previously linked directly to North Korea.”
“Technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks,” a statement from the FBI read. “Separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyber attack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea.”