Is N. Korea going back on terror sponsor list?

The United States is weighing whether to put North Korea back on its list of state sponsors of terrorism in the aftermath of a massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment by Pyongyang, President Obama said in an interview airing Sunday.

{mosads}“We’re going to review those through a process that’s already in place,” Obama told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We’ve got very clear criteria as to what it means for a state to sponsor terrorism. And we don’t make those judgments just based on the news of the day. We look systematically at what’s been done and based on those facts, we’ll make those determinations in the future.”

Last week, Obama announced that Secretary of State John Kerry was undertaking a review of Cuba’s status on the list, which limits U.S. aid, exports and financial transactions, as part of the president’s push to normalize relations with Cuba.

North Korea is already more heavily sanctioned than any other country, so it’s not clear that the official designation would have far-reaching effects. Still, it could be a powerful symbolic move in the aftermath of the data breach, which Obama described as “very costly” and “very expensive.”

The White House has vowed a “proportional response” to what Obama described as “cyber vandalism.”

The president did indicate that Kerry was likely to find reason to remove Cuba from the state sponsor of terror list, saying he thought it would be hard to have relations with Havana if they remained on the list.