Korea broadcasts encrypted spy message on YouTube

Seoul: North Korea on Saturday broadcast a series of mysterious numbers, presumed to be an encrypted message to its spies in the South, for the first time on YouTube, a media report said.

A video clip was posted on the state-run Radio Pyongyang's YouTube account, in which a female announcer read what she described as "an information technology review assignment of the remote education university for No. 719 expedition agents", said the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency.

She repeated phrases such as "No. 23 on Page 564, No. -19 on Page 479" for about one minute in the posting. The numbers were not broadcast on the radio. North Korea has broadcast such seemingly random numbers via radio since the Cold War era, as recently as March 7 and 13.

But this is the first time that Pyongyang has used the global video-sharing platform to send the apparently coded messages.