2014 seems like so very long ago, but there’s apparently still a bit of fallout that needs to be addressed from the massive Sony hack—the one that resulted in tons of private emails getting released, a handful of movies getting leaked, and chairperson Amy Pascal getting fired. At the time, Sony suggested that North Korea was involved, possibly as some sort of retaliation against Sony for making Seth Rogen and James Franco’s The Interview (which poked fun at Kim Jong Un), but Rogen has since said that he never really bought that explanation (partly because it implies that the hack was somewhat his fault).
Either way, the Department Of Justice has now officially noted that a North Korean computer programmer named Park Jim Hyok played a role in the hack, alongside a team called the Lazarus Group that is “sponsored by the Democratic People’s Republic Of Korea.” That comes from Deadline, which says the DOJ held a press conference today about the results of its investigations into the hack, which it does believe was meant as “retaliation” for The Interview. The DOJ says that Park Jim Hyok worked for a North Korean government front company that supported “malicious cyber activities,” including an $81 million “cyberheist” from Bangladesh Bank, the WannaCry worm that infected 200,000 computers and demanded a ransom payment in bitcoin.
The DOJ believes that Park is somewhere in North Korea, which naturally doesn’t have an extradition agreement with the U.S. government, so there’s probably nothing that anyone can do—especially since he’s probably working for the North Korean government. Plus, Donald Trump is best friends with the North Korean government, and he did just thank Kim Jong Un on Twitter earlier today for his “unwavering faith” in the Trump presidency, so we probably shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize America’s relationship with its—sigh—strongest ally.