The North Korean military has around 30,000 electronic warfare specialists with capabilities rivaling those of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Fox News reported Tuesday, citing defectors and other sources.

The U.S. broadcaster’s report titled “North Korea’s cyber army gets increasingly sophisticated,” came after a series of cyber attacks on key government and corporate websites in South Korea, which Seoul officials believe were masterminded by the communist state.

“According to defectors, the North Korean military has amassed as many as 30,000 electronic warfare specialists and they have become the elite core of the military,” the report said.

“Defectors say that the regime now culls the brightest students from the nation’s universities and funnels them into special secret schools that concentrate on hacking and developing cyber warfare programs targeted at South Korea.”

Pointing out that among the most frequent visitors to U.S. military web sites are computers traced to the North, it said the North could pose a serious threat to U.S. military networks.

“In fact, South Korea’s intelligence agencies now believe that North Korea has the capability to paralyze the U.S. Pacific Command and cause extensive damage to defense networks inside the United States,” the report said.

Citing one defector, who was an officer in the North Korean electronic warfare command, the report said, “The heart of the effort is centered at Automation University, where 100 to 110 hackers a year are trained in advanced electronic espionage every year.”

It also cited a comment by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il on the importance of electronic warfare in the modern-era war, underscoring that Kim has made cyber warfare a “top, though secret, priority of his paranoid regime.”

The comment appeared in a manual on electronic warfare, which was published by the North Korean military in 2005 and obtained by a South Korean Christian group last August.

“As I mentioned many times before, the modern-day warfare is electronic warfare. Success in a modern war depends on how we carry out the electronic warfare operations,” Kim said in the manual.

The latest cyber attack on April 12 that paralyzed the banking system of the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, or Nonghyup, for several weeks, has prompted public calls for stronger measures to safeguard key financial institutions in the South from the new kind of cyber terrorism.

“The North started making efforts to bolster cyber warfare capabilities in the early 1980s. They invited 30 to 40 computer experts from the former Soviet Union to raise cyber warriors. Well-performing students were chosen as researchers or sent to the military intelligence body,” Hong Sung-pyo, military strategy professor at the graduate school for national strategy at National Defense University, told The Korea Herald.

Experts say that the North has turned to cyber warfare tactics as it is aware that it cannot defeat its more affluent enemy forces with conventional, symmetrical war strategies.

Kim Heung-kwang, who defected to the South in 2004 after working as a professor at a computer technology university in the North for 20 years, said that the North was focusing on cyber and electronic warfare capabilities as it can cause massive damage to its enemy at low cost.

“Cyber warfare capabilities are asymmetrical ones that can shake up the centerpiece of the South Korean society. The cost of establishing and running cyber warfare facilities is very low while its impact is great,” he told The Korea Herald.

“The North appears to be taking advantage of the weak sense of security in cyberspace in South Korea as witnessed in the recent attack on Nonghyup.”

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)