SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea lashed out at the United States on Saturday, blaming it for disruptions that cut off the nation's already limited connections to the Internet, while once again rejecting U.S. accusations that it was behind the hacking of Sony Pictures.
The statement, carried by the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency, also called President Barack Obama a "monkey" for urging the film studio to release The Interview, a comedy depicting the assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. Sony had canceled the movie's release out of fear of further attacks but then reversed itself after Obama criticized it for capitulating to North Korean pressure.
The statement by the National Defense Commission, which is led by Kim and is the country's most powerful governing body, is the North's first response to the intermittent disruptions that have crippled its tenuous connection to cyberspace since Monday. The connectivity problems, which at one point appeared to sever North Korea completely from the Internet, started days after Obama vowed to retaliate for the damaging attack on the Sony film studio.
"U.S. President Obama is the chief culprit," the National Defense Commission said. When Sony Pictures said it would withdraw the film, "Obama urged it to unconditionally screen the movie," the statement reads.
The White House's National Security Council declined to comment Saturday.
Speaking earlier this month, Obama said he held the North responsible for the hacking of Sony, which took place just before the studio was to release The Interview. The attackers stole confidential emails, salary information and unreleased movies, which they then posted online.
The United States has denied playing a role in the Internet disruptions, which struck many of North Korea's few websites. Internet experts have said the failures could have been caused by anything from technical malfunctions to a hacking attack.
Dan Holden, director of security research for Arbor Networks Inc. in Massachusetts, said North Korea appeared to suffer a relatively simple distributed denial-of-service attack. Such attacks flood Internet servers with traffic to knock infrastructure offline.
It's unlikely the attack was carried out by the U.S., as any hacker could probably do it by spending $200, Holden said.
"If the U.S. government was going to do something, it would not be so blatant, and it would be way worse," he said.
However, in its statement Saturday, the North made it clear that it viewed the disruptions as the work of a U.S. attack.
North Korea did not say if it would retaliate for the disruptions, but it did accuse the United States of acting like a schoolyard bully.
"The United States, with its large physical size and oblivious to the shame of playing hide and seek as children with runny noses would, has begun disrupting the Internet operations of the main media outlets of our republic," according to the statement. In the past few days, the websites of the state-run news agency and the newspaper Rodong Sinmun, two of the North's main outlets to the world, were among those that went dead for several hours.
The U.S. administration, the statement said, had "feigned ignorance" of the attack.
The North also blamed Obama for the release of the movie, which it said undermined "the dignity of the supreme leadership."
"Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest," the statement said.
It wasn't the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top U.S. and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, North Korea called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a "hideous" lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North's official news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the "shape of a monkey."
A State Department spokesman at the time called the North Korean dispatch "offensive and ridiculous and absurd."
The United States has requested China's help in punishing its ally North Korea, but Beijing has appeared reluctant to get involved, condemning cyberattacks and arguing that there was no proof of who was responsible for the attack on Sony.
The statement Saturday repeated earlier denials that North Korea was behind the attack on Sony Pictures and demanded that the United States back up its accusation with proof.
"Obama had better thrust himself to cleaning up all the evil doings" that the United States has perpetrated against the North, the statement said.
North Korea earlier said any U.S. punishment over the cyberattack on Sony would lead to retaliation "thousands of times greater."
North Korea has said it doesn't know the identity of the hackers -- who call themselves "Guardians of Peace" -- who claimed responsibility for breaking into Sony's computer network.
The vaguely threatening tone echoed threats of violence against movie theaters that planned to screen The Interview. Those threats were a factor in Sony's decision to cancel the film's release, but the studio eventually reversed its decision, making the movie available to a limited number of theaters and online for downloads. It played to packed houses and took in nearly $1 million in opening-day ticket sales.
The movie has proved to be a surprise success in China, with tens of thousands of people downloading it -- most illegally -- within hours of it being made available online.
Many Chinese Web users left positive reviews online, even without seeing the movie, as a gesture of protest against censorship, while others appeared to enjoy the lampooning of the North Korean regime.
The country's leader is often mockingly referred to by Chinese Web users as "Fatty Kim III."
That popular reception was something of an embarrassment for the nationalist Global Times newspaper, which had earlier accused the United States of "senseless cultural arrogance" over the movie.
On Friday, the state-owned newspaper was forced to admit that some Chinese Web users had "criticized North Korea for lacking a sense of humor" and that they had called the movie's release an "act of justice."
Still, the newspaper insisted that the movie's popularity would be short-lived, calling it "low quality." The movie, the newspaper insisted, represented the West's "distorted view of North Korea."
North Korea and the U.S. remain technically in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The rivals also are locked in an international standoff over North Korea's nuclear and missile programs and its alleged human rights abuses.
A United Nations commission accuses North Korea of a wide array of crimes against humanity, including murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment and rape.
The U.S. stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as a deterrent against North Korean aggression.
Information for this article was contributed by Martin Fackler of The New York Times; by Hyung-jin Kim and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press; by Jungah Lee and Sam Kim of Bloomberg News; and by Simon Denyer and Xu Jing of The Washington Post.
A Section on 12/28/2014