North Korea, usually blamed for hacking others, has accused the US of staging cyber attacks against its internet servers after reports of disruptions to the North's main news services.
Russia's Itar-Tass news agency said a "powerful hacker attack" from abroad had brought down internet servers in the North, disabling access to some websites.
Tensions are high between North Korea, South Korea and the South's ally the US after UN sanctions were tightened against the regime in Pyongyang because of its latest nuclear test.
The North has cancelled peacemaking contacts and threatened a nuclear strike against the US. War games that are under way between the South and the US have added to the bellicose air.
South Korea's MBC television said the North's state media services were among those affected by the cyber attack. These included the websites of the KCNA news agency and the official Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which were said to be experiencing disruptions even though they were operating normally on Thursday and Friday.
"It is nobody's secret that the US and the South Korean puppet regime are massively bolstering up cyber forces in a bid to intensify the subversive activities and sabotages against the DPRK," KCNA said on Friday.
"Intensive and persistent virus attacks are being made every day on internet servers operated by the DPRK."
KCNA and Rodong Sinmun have carried the North's increasingly strident rhetoric of late, accusing the US and South Korea of staging preparations for war and vowing to scrap the armistice that stopped fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War.
North Korea has itself been blamed for spreading malicious software that crashed the websites of government agencies and businesses, and for a cyber attack on a South Korean state-run bank server in 2011 that took more than a week to fix.
North Korea denies cyber attacks and accuses the South of a conspiracy to fuel confrontation, although defectors from the North have said that Pyongyang is recruiting thousands of computer engineers to its cyber warfare unit.
Military experts have said cyber warfare is a major threat from North Korea, along with its conventional forces and its weapons of mass destruction programme, posing a security risk to utilities and communication networks in the South.
North Korea has been accused of jamming global positioning system signals, affecting hundreds of flights at South Korea's main airport.
US spy agencies said this week for the first time that cyber attacks and cyber espionage had supplanted terrorism as the top security threat facing the US.
Washington and China are embroiled in their own row over hacking, with the US president, Barack Obama, calling his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to discuss the issue this week.
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