North Korea denies hacking, warns claim threatens U.S. ties

PYONGYANG, North Korea

— North Korea denied claims by the United States that a computer programmer working for the North Korean government was involved in the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment and the spread of the WannaCry ransomware virus.

In a statement Friday, a North Korean Foreign Ministry official said that the person named by the U.S. is a “non-entity” and warned that the allegations, which he called a smear campaign, could harm talks between the two countries following the summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

U.S. federal prosecutors allege that the programmer, identified as Park Jin Hyok, conspired to conduct a series of attacks that included the theft of $81 million from a bank in Bangladesh.

The U.S. believes he was working for a North Korea-sponsored hacking organization.

“The act of cybercrimes mentioned by the Justice Department has nothing to do with us,” Han

Yong Song, a researcher at the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s Institute for American Studies, said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency.

The statement continues, “The U.S. is totally mistaken if it seeks to gain anything from us through preposterous falsehoods and high-handedness.”

The U.S. government has said that North Korea was responsible for the Sony hack, which led to the release of personal information about employees, including Social Security numbers, financial records and salary information, as well as embarrassing emails among Sony executives.

The FBI has also long suspected North Korea was behind Wannacry, which used malware to scramble data on hundreds of thousands of computers at hospitals, factories, government agencies, banks and other businesses across the globe.

Park is charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit computer and wire fraud.

The complaint said Park was on a team of programmers employed by a government front company called Chosun Expo that operated out of Dalian, China. The Treasury Department has added his name to its sanction list, prohibiting banks that do business in the U.S. from providing accounts to him or Chosun Expo.