How did President Obama know North Korea was behind the Sony hack? Because we hacked them first!

Many Internet security experts and firms were quick to question President Barack Obama's claim that North Korea was behind the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment in December of 2014, especially so soon after the hacks took place. But the New York Times has revealed why the President was so confident, due to a large scale hacking effort undertaken by the United States four years ago.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The National Security Agency, America's massive domestic and foreign spy agency has long infiltrated North Korean hacking groups, starting back in 2010 when the NSA had broken into Chinese networks that connected the hermit kingdom to the Internet at large.

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The NSA installed malware into these North Korean and Chinese networks, including the networks used by Bureau 121, the group that is likely responsible to the Sony hack.

The hack leaked private salary information, personal and inter-business correspondence, and the hackers threatened that if Sony released "The Interview"-a movie which showed a fictional plot to assassinate the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un-it would be an "act of war" against North Korea, and the U.S. would suffer from terrorist attacks.

Though this information and capability to hack into foreign and hostile hacker groups is a powerful and useful tool for the U.S. government, it is unclear if the NSA should still have this sort of power.

U.S. officials have described the NSA as an effective "early warning radar," but the agency's knowledge of the attack only surfaced after the attack had already taken place.

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Following the attack North Korea's very limited access to the Internet was shut down, though the U.S. did not claim responsibility and online experts did say that such an attack could be preformed by an individual or a group, and did not bear the hallmarks of an attack from sophisticated systems that the U.S. would posses.

The only evident retaliation from the U.S. came in the form of additional sanctions, which targeted specific individuals.

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