President Obama: Sony Made A Mistake

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Perhaps the most important element in the Sony Corp (ADR) SNE hack fiasco was that it wasn’t a case of industrial sabotage, but rather a country (North Korea) attacking a private firm. President Barack Obama discussed the topic in his end-of-year conference for 2014.

"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced," Obama said. "Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake. In this interconnected digital world, there are going to be opportunities for hackers to engage in cyber-assaults, both in the private sector and in 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."

Related Link: Sony Hires FireEye To Clean Up Hacking Mess

He continued, "When I came into the office, I stood up a cyber-security inter-agency team to look at everything that we could do at the government level, to prevent these kinds of attacks. We have been coordinating with the private sector, but a lot more needs to be done, we are not even close to where we need to be."

Obama emphasized on the seriousness of this hack-attack by saying, "We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like."

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Posted In: CNBCPoliticsPsychologyMediaGeneralBloombergNorth KoreaPresident Obama
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