WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's administration has sought China's help in recent days in blocking North Korea's ability to launch cyberattacks, the first steps toward the "proportional response" that Obama promised to make the North pay for the assault on Sony Pictures.
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The response is also part of a campaign to issue a broader warning against future hacking, according to senior administration officials.
"What we are looking for is a blocking action, something that would cripple their efforts to carry out attacks," one official said.
North Korea, meanwhile, on Saturday proposed a joint investigation with the U.S. into the hacking attack against Sony, warning of "serious" consequences if Washington rejects an inquiry that it believes would prove that Pyongyang had nothing to do with the cyberattack.
So far, the Chinese have not responded to the U.S. request. Their cooperation would be critical, since virtually all of North Korea's telecommunications run through Chinese-operated networks. It is unclear whether China will help, given tensions over computer security between Washington and Beijing since the Justice Department in May indicted five hackers working for the Chinese military on charges of stealing sensitive information from U.S. companies.
The secret approach to China came as U.S. officials convened a half-dozen meetings in the White House Situation Room last week, including one with the top national security team Thursday night, in developing options to give to the president during his vacation in Hawaii.
The options include new economic sanctions, mirroring those recently placed on Russian oligarchs and officials close to President Vladimir Putin, which would cut off their access to cash -- the one perk that allows the elite who surround North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to live lifestyles that their starving countrymen can barely imagine.
The sessions also included discussions of "information operations" directed at the North Korean people, officials said, but similar efforts by South Korea to sway opinion in the North have often created a backlash.
The cyberattack was the first major, state-sponsored computer-network assault on U.S. soil. The president has asked the military's Cyber Command, which is led by the same four-star admiral who directs the National Security Agency, to come up with the range of options.
For now, the White House appears to have rejected what one Defense Department official termed "a demonstration strike" in cyberspace that could have included targets such as North Korean military facilities, computer network servers and communications networks.
One potential target is Yongbyon, the center of North Korea's nuclear program, where the state has invested huge sums to produce plutonium and uranium fuel for its small arsenal of nuclear weapons. Because of its geographic and technological isolation, Yongbyon is considered a far harder target to attack than Iran's nuclear facilities, the subject of a U.S. cyberoperation code-named Olympic Games.
One official involved in the high-level debates said the challenge was to find a mix of actions that "the North Koreans will notice" but that will not be so public that Kim's government loses face and feels compelled to respond.
By some accounts, what the administration is trying to create is a computer equivalent to the "Proliferation Security Initiative," an effort begun in George W. Bush's administration and also aimed at North Korea, to stop the shipment of nuclear materials and other weaponry. But in cyberspace that is a far harder task, since it is easier for the North Koreans to reroute computer code at lightning speed than to reroute a cargo ship carrying missiles.
Any financial sanctions also are tricky. North Korea is under perhaps the heaviest sanctions on Earth. The one sanction in the past decade that caused the most pain to the North Korean leadership was the freezing of its accounts at a bank in Macau, which held the money that the North Korean leadership uses to buy luxury goods and would use to fund an escape if the officials need to flee the country.
The hacking resulted in the disclosure of tens of thousands of confidential Sony emails and business files. In response to it and threats that followed, U.S. movie theaters and Sony canceled the Christmas Day release of The Interview, a comedy about a plot to assassinate Kim.
On Saturday, an unidentified North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman in Pyongyang proposed the joint investigation with the U.S., saying the North knows how to prove it's not responsible for the hacking.
"The U.S. should bear in mind that it will face serious consequences in case it rejects our proposal for joint investigation and presses for what it called countermeasures while finding fault with" North Korea, the spokesman said in a statement carried by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency.
"We have a way to prove that we have nothing to do with the case without resorting to torture, as the CIA does," he said, adding that the U.S. lacks any specific evidence tying North Korea to the hacking.
In Washington, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, Mark Stroh, said the U.S. stands by the FBI's conclusion that "the North Korean government is responsible for this destructive attack."
"The government of North Korea has a long history of denying responsibility for destructive and provocative actions," Stroh said. "If the North Korean government wants to help, they can admit their culpability and compensate Sony for the damages this attack caused."
An editorial in the Global Times, a newspaper published by China's ruling Communist Party, said any civilized country will oppose hacker attacks or terror threats, but it also condemned the movie. "The vicious mocking of Kim is only a result of senseless cultural arrogance," it said.
Koh Yu-hwan, a professor at Seoul's Dongguk University, called the North's proposal a "typical" tactic the country has taken in similar disputes. In 2010, North Korea proposed a joint investigation after a South Korean-led international team concluded that the North was behind a torpedo attack that killed 46 South Korean sailors, though Pyongyang denied its involvement. South Korea rejected the offer.
"They are now talking about a joint investigation because they think there is no conclusive evidence," Koh said.
On Friday, Obama said Sony "made a mistake" in shelving the film. Sony said it had no choice but to cancel distribution of the movie because theaters were refusing to show it.
The GOP called on supporters to buy tickets to the movie if theater owners reverse their decision.
The Republican Party chairman, Reince Priebus, said in a letter to theater chain executives that he's concerned that a foreign regime would be allowed to dictate the movies Americans can watch.
Priebus said he will ask Republican supporters to buy tickets and suggested that part of the proceeds go to military charities.
Even if Obama was ready to respond with a cyberattack, it would not be instantaneous.
"One of the things people often overlook is the complexity and time it takes to launch an attack," said Oren Falkowitz, a former analyst at the NSA who now runs Area 1, a security company.
In the past, other countries have resorted to basic distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers flood a target's systems with Internet traffic until they collapse under the load. But very little of North Korea's network infrastructure is connected to the global Internet. The result, Falkowitz says, is that a similar attack on the North would amount to "ankle biting."
Tom Kellermann, a former member of the presidential commission on cybersecurity, said one option was what security experts refer to as a "hack back," in which they use the attackers' own computer footprints and back doors to deploy an attack that destroys North Korea's attack infrastructure, or compromises the integrity of the machines that did the hacking.
For example, the United States could deploy a malicious payload that encrypts the data on North Korea's machines, or renders them unable to reboot -- clearly "proportional," in the president's words, because that was what happened to Sony's computers.
But attack tools can be swapped out, and by destroying attackers' systems, the United States would lose its ability to monitor them for future attacks.
Kellermann predicted a campaign of information warfare, in which the United States plays on North Korea's worst fears by using its access to the North Korean domestic computer and radio systems to deploy propaganda inside North Korea's closed media bubble.
Earlier Saturday, North Korea denounced a move by the United Nations to take its human-rights record before the Security Council and renewed its threat to further bolster its nuclear deterrent against what it called a hostile policy by the U.S. to topple its ruling regime.
Pyongyang "vehemently and categorically rejects" the resolution passed by the U.N. General Assembly that could open the door for its leaders to be hauled before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, according to a Foreign Ministry statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency.
The Security Council is to meet Monday to discuss Pyongyang's human rights situation for the first time.
Information for this article was contributed by David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times and by Hyung-Jin Kim, Eric Talmadge and staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/21/2014