The world got a
sneak peek at North Korea's secretive Internet service this week, which we now
know includes a grand total of 28 websites.
On Sept. 19, one of
North Korea's top-level nameservers was incorrectly configured to reveal a list
of websites under the .kp domain. Security engineer Matt Bryant discovered the
data and posted it to GitHub.
"One of North
Korea's top-level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global
[domain name system] zone transfers," the file description says.
"This allows anyone who performs [a zone transfer] request to the
country's ns2.kptc.kp nameserver to get a copy of the nation's top-level DNS
data."
Many of the sites
seem fairly commonplace by global Web standards: Air Koryo airline, Korean
recipes, insurance company, elderly care fund, Pyongyang International Film
Festival, Kim Il Sung University. But some, as Motherboard points out, offer deeper insight into
government propaganda: the website for the country's official newspaper, Rodong
Sinmun, includes headlines like "Kim Jong Un Sends Birthday Spreads to
Veteran Scholars." A full list was shared to Reddit, though a number of links are still
inaccessible.
"We now have a
complete list of domain names for the country and it's surprisingly (or perhaps
unsurprisingly) very small," Bryant told Motherboard.
North Koreans have
very limited to non-existent access to the Web. In 2008, the government launched Koryolink,
a 3G mobile service offering voice calls in major cities and rail routes;
locals, however, could still not place international calls or connect to the
Web. Five years later, global visitors to the country were allowedto
access Koryolink's 3G services on mobile devices.
In April, North
Korea formally banned Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and
South Korean websites, as well as gambling and porn services.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.
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