N Korea warns of "powerful retaliation" against nuclear threats

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) would counter enemy nuclear threats with even more powerful nuclear attacks, a spokesman of DPRK Supreme Military Command said today.

The spokesman's remarks came on the US move to dispatch B-52 bombers and nuclear-powered submarines to DPRK rival South Korea. He said US warning messages and intimidation would not frighten the DPRK army and people.

He reminded the US that the Anderson Air Force Base in Guam where B-52s took off and naval bases in Japan proper and Okinawa where nuclear-powered submarines were launched were within the striking range of the DPRK's precision strike means, the official KCNA news agency reported.

The KCNA added, that now that the US had started open nuclear blackmail and threat, the DPRK, too, would move to take corresponding military actions.

Tensions are running high on the Korean Peninsula after the DPRK conducted its third nuclear test on 12 February by way of a countermeasure against the joint military drills of the US and South Korea (See: N Korea vows N-test, missile launches 'aimed at US') .http://www.domain-b.com/defence/general/20130124_missile_launches.html

The DPRK also threatened the launch of a preemptive nuclear strike for self-defense and unilateral nullification of the 1953 armistice that suspended the Korean War.

Meanwhile, a hacking attack that brought down three South Korean broadcasters as also two major banks had been identified by most commentators flexing of its muscles by North Korea amid increasing military tensions on the divided peninsula.

Officials in Seoul traced the breach yesterday to a server in China that N Korean hackers had used in the past, which served to underline the vulnerability of South Korea, the world's most wired economy, to unconventional warfare.

According to China's foreign ministry the hacking attacks were a "global problem", anonymous and cross-border.

Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters that hackers often used the IP addresses of other countries to carry out their attacks.

A government official in Seoul directly blamed Pyongyang, although according to police and the country's computer crime agency, it would take months to firmly establish responsibility.

According to Jang Se-yul, a former North Korean soldier who went to a military college in Pyongyang to groom hackers but in 2008 defected to the South estimates the North had around 3,000 troops, including 600 professional hackers, in its cyber-unit.

Jang's alma mater, the Mirim University, now known as the University of Automation, was set up in the late 1980s to help North Korea's military automation and had a special class in professional hacking.

Jang told Reuters, that the professional "cyber-warriors" of North Korea enjoyed perks including luxury apartments for their role in what Pyongyang defined as a new front in its "war" against the South.