Elizabeth Weise, Kevin Johnson, and Andrea Mandell

USA Today

WASHINGTON – Sony did the wrong thing when it backed down and pulled The Interview in the face of North Korean hacker threats, President Obama said at his new conference Friday.

"I wish they had spoken to me first," he said. "I would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks."

But on the heels of Obama's pointed comments, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton gave his first television interview to CNN. "We have not caved. We have not given in. We have persevered," he told Fareed Zakaria.

CNN began airing excerpts of the interview Friday. In it, Lynton disputed Obama's assertion that they didn't talk with him. "We definitely spoke to a senior adviser in the White House to talk about the situation," he said.

Friday evening, Sony Pictures issued a follow-up statement. The company said that although free expression "should never be suppressed by threats and extortion," it "had no choice" but to halt distribution.

"Let us be clear – the only decision that we have made with respect to release of the film was not to release it on Christmas Day in theaters, after the theater owners declined to show it. Without theaters, we could not release it in the theaters on Christmas Day."

"After that decision, we immediately began actively surveying alternatives to enable us to release the movie on a different platform. It is still our hope that anyone who wants to see this movie will get the opportunity to do so," the statement concluded.

Earlier Friday, the FBI confirmed that North Korea was behind the cyberattacks on Sony Pictures. "As a result of our investigation, and in close collaboration with other U.S. Government departments and agencies, the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions,'' an FBI statement said.

"While the need to protect sensitive sources and methods precludes us from sharing all of this information, our conclusion is based, in part, on similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks," the FBI said in a brief statement

Sony Pictures Entertainment's computer network was attacked by hackers on Nov. 24. Sony's computer network was crippled and almost 38 million files were stolen. Since then, highly damaging and embarrassing files stolen from Sony have been doled out on file-sharing websites.

The hack was apparently in response to the planned release of The Interview, a comedy about an assassination attempt against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that featured James Franco and Seth Rogen as tabloid TV journalists. Sony on Tuesday killed the film's release.

Obama said he was sympathetic to the damage and threats Sony has dealt with. " "Having said all that, yes I think they made a mistake," Obama said.

"We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States," he said. "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."

Even worse, Obama said, "imagine if producers and distributors and others started engaging in self-censorship because they don't want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended."

"That's not who we are. That's not what America's about," he said.

Lynton seems to indicate that while he didn't specifically ask the White House whether the studio should cut The Interview, "the White House was certainly aware of the situation."

SONY CEO CITES THREAT TO AUDIENCE

The crucial decision point came when the hackers began threatening audiences who planned on going to theaters to see the film, Lynton said. "The movie theaters came to us one by one over the course of a very short time. We were very surprised by it," the CEO added. "They announced that they would not carry the movie. At that point in time we had no alternative to not proceed with a theatrical release on the 25th of December."

​Lynton said he didn't regret making the movie. "I would make the movie again. For the same reasons we made it in the first place--it was a funny comedy, it served as political satire...Knowing what I know now, we might have done something slightly differently, but I think a lot of events have overtaken us in a way that we had no control over," he told CNN. Still, "we would still like the public to see this movie, absolutely," he said.

The United States will act on the cyberattack, but Obama did not go into detail about how. "We will respond, we will respond proportionally, and in a place and time that we choose. It's not something that I will announce here today at this press conference," he said.

In the FBI statement, the agency said that, "further, North Korea's attack on SPE (Sony Pictures Entertainment) reaffirms that cyber threats pose one of the gravest national security dangers to the United States.''

The FBI said that it had "determined that the intrusion into SPE's network consisted of the deployment of destructive malware and the theft of proprietary information as well as employees' personally identifiable information and confidential communications.'

While it has seen a rising number of cyber breaches, "the destructive nature of this attack, coupled with its coercive nature, sets it apart," the FBI said.

In addition to the coding similarities, the FBI said it had found other evidence of North Korea's involvement, including the discovery of several Internet addresses "associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hard-coded into the data deletion malware used in this attack."

Also, the FBI found that tools used in the Sony attack were similar to an attack launched last March against South Korean banks and media outlets carried out by North Korea.

Former senator Chris Dodd, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, called the hack "a despicable, criminal act."

HACKERS RESPOND

Late Thursday, Sony received conflicting messages purportedly from the hackers. One, posted publicly, told the studio it has "suffered enough" and is free to release The Interview.

At the same time, a private message sent to some Sony executives Thursday night told them they had made a "very wise" decision when they canceled the Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy, an official at Sony told USA TODAY on background. The official would not be identified because the person was not authorized to speak on the record.

The dueling messages are diametrically opposed.

The private message read, "Now we want you never let the movie released, distributed or leaked in any form of, for instance, DVD or piracy," adding "And we want everything related to the movie, including its trailers, as well as its full version down from any website hosting them immediately."

That's a very different one from the a public posting, also made late Thursday night, to Pastebin, an online file-sharing website. The hackers have been using Pastebin to release their messages for the past several weeks. That message read, "You have suffered through enough threats. We lift the ban. The Interview may release now."

It is impossible to know if the Pastebin message is actually from the Guardians of Peace, the shadowy hacker group that claims to have infiltrated Sony's computer network and stolen millions of files.