The FBI said Wednesday that U.S. officials know Sony hackers were from North Korea because exclusive Internet addresses were revealed by accident on multiple occasions.
“Several times … they connected directly, and we could see them,” Director James Comey said at an FBI-Fordham University cybersecurity conference, Politico reported. “It was a mistake by them that we haven’t told you about before.”
Mr. Comey added that the IP addresses the Sony hackers were using are “exclusively” used by North Korea.
The Obama administration issued an executive order Jan. 2 that authorized further sanctions against North Korea for its role in the cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. The company lost terabytes of information, which included scripts, unreleased movies and embarrassing emails.
In response to the charge that the FBI has it wrong on the identity of the hackers, Mr. Comey replied critics “don’t have the facts that I have. They don’t see what I see. … [T]here’s not much I have high confidence about — I have very high confidence in this attribution,” Business Insider reported.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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