North Korea’s Internet Is Exposed And It Has Only 28 Websites

North Korea is one such kid who wants to hide all of his toys and the internet is one of them. The country has its own censored internet and the world knows almost nothing about it—except the fact that it has internet rooms with no internet. But there are some curious minds who want to get a sneak peek. One such person even managed to do so.

The people who look after North Korea’s nameservers (DNS servers) made a mistake. They somehow ended up opening the servers for the world. Anyone could make a request and get a list of the domains registered.

Mathew Bryant (mandatoryprogrammer) was able to find the mistake. His TLDR project involves DNS zone transfer attempts against root nameservers and all existing top level domain servers to keep an eye on the changes in these zones over time. The data from the attempts, made every two hours, is stored in Bryant’s GitHub repository.

DNS zone transfer basically means initiating an AXFR request to a nameserver to get the list of its DNS databases. As a part of Bryant’s project, an AXFR request was made to North Korea’s nameserver ns2.kptc.kp to fetch the details about the domains on their nameserver. He published the domain list his on GitHub repository NorthKoreaDNSLeak. Bryant is consistent with monitoring various top-level domains. He says that many countries don’t easily reveal such kind of data, so it’s good to get it when it’s available.

The domain list contains only 28 entries. It seems that their limited edition internet has one website for different type of things. And, surprisingly, they have a GNU repository. A hacker news user commented, “yay at least their software is free”.

Similarly, they have a website for movies which looks like the clone of a primary website, “movie4k clone at least there it is legal, lol”. We tried to access some of the websites but either they failed to load or were with broken images. But one thing is for sure, North Korea needs to increase the salary of their web developers.

A Reddit thread hosts the images for the different website associated to the domain name .kp.

— Via Motherboard

If you have something to add, tell us in the comments below.