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North Korea Accidently Leaks How Tiny Its Internet Is

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Tom Hale

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Tom Hale

Senior Journalist

Tom is a writer in London with a Master's degree in Journalism whose editorial work covers anything from health and the environment to technology and archaeology.

Senior Journalist

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Screenshot from "Voice Of Korea"

Yesterday, a GitHub file dump revealed all the registered domains listed to the “.kp” country code top-level domain for North Korea. Essentially, it revealed that the hermit kingdom only has 28 websites.

Although many of the websites are inaccessible, they give a rare insight through the keyhole of North Korea's all-encompassing leadership and its very, very dull Internet.

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Among the websites are a flight ticket website, a cooking site, a film website, a few educational sites, the North Korean tourist board, news agencies, and a social sciences website. They even appear to have a kind of social network site called “Friend.”

You can still access many of the websites above, although it might take a while to load – after all, they’re probably not too used to heavy international traffic. 

An accompanying GitHub post explained how cyber security experts managed to get their hands on the data: “On Sept 19, 2016, at approximately 10:00PM (PST), one of North Korea's top level name servers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS zone transfers. This allows anyone who performs an `AXFR` (zone transfer) request to the country's `ns2.kptc.kp` nameserver to get a copy of the nation's top level DNS data. This was detected by the [TL;DR Project].”

The file dump made its way onto Reddit’s r/Technology, and users quickly posted screenshots and digested some of the information. 

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Screenshot from "Korean Central News Agency"

Much of the news stories are heavily focus on supreme leader Kim Jong-un, his father and former leader Kim Jong-Il, or North Korea's recent nuclear weapons tests.

Here are some examples of the headlines from the state-controlled news websites:

“[North] Korean nuclear test of will for sovereignty and peace"

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"Russian Body Supports DPRK's Nuclear Warhead Explosion Test"

"Narcotic-related Crimes Increase among S. Korean Youngsters"

Another story explained "It is the unanimous desires and legitimate right of the Korean people to pull the US forces out of south Korea and achieve peace on the Korean peninsula... The Korean people will never give up their just cause to shatter the US military threat and economic pressure.”

Screenshot of Friends.kp via Imgur


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  • tag
  • internet,

  • North Korea,

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  • leak,

  • internet culture,

  • website

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