US will act against N Korea for Sony cyber attack: Obama

US President Barack Obama today said that he would take action against North Korea for its alleged role in the cyber-attack on the Sony Pictures film company which he said made a mistake by cancelling the release of its upcoming movie because of the threat.
"Sony's a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake," Obama told reporters during his year-end news conference.
"In this interconnected digital world, there are going to be opportunities for attackers to engage in cyber assaults, both in the private sector and the public sector. Now, our first order of business is making sure that we do everything to harden sites and prevent those kinds of attacks from taking place," he said.

North Korea, he argued, caused a lot of damage.
"We will respond. We will respond proportionally, and we'll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. It's not something that I will announce here today at a press conference," Obama said and repeatedly refused to answer questions on the nature of the US response to the North Korean cyber attack.
"More broadly, though, this points to the need for us to work with the international community to start setting up some very clear rules of the road in terms of how the Internet operates. Right now, it's sort of the wild west," he said.

"And part of the problem is, is you've got weak states that can engage in these kinds of attacks. You've got non-state actors that can do enormous damage. That's part of what makes this issue of cyber-security so urgent," he said.

Obama wished that Sony could have spoken to him before deciding to cancel the release of its movie "The Interview" after the cyber attack.
"That's not who we are. That's not what America is about. I'm sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other. I wish they had spoken to me first. I would've told them 'do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks'," Obama said.

"But I think all of us have to anticipate occasionally there are going to be breaches like this. They're going to be costly. They're going to be serious. We take them with the utmost seriousness.
"But we can't start changing our patterns of behaviour any more than we stop going to a football game because there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack; any more than Boston didn't run its marathon this year because of the possibility that somebody might try to cause harm," Obama said.