North Korea is the country that is often called a prison with international borders. It is known for being notoriously closed towards the outside world. However, some leaks have been revealed accidentally, and now we can sneek peek into their country without any offense.
A Reddit thread gave a link to a GitHub data dump that included a list of accidentally revealed websites registered to North Korea’s official domain, .kp. Before this incident, the North Korea’s web habits and registered domains were unknown. Thanks to this astounding revelation, now we have a list of 28 sites that were openly accessible.
According to the GitHub post, this incident happened when the North Korean authorities accidentally opened a server holding the domain name information. This practically opened the gate for anyone to get hold of their data.
On Sept 19, 2016 at approximately 10:00PM (PST), one of North Korea’s top level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS zone transfers. Anyone who performs an
AXFR(zone transfer) request to the country’sns2.kptc.kpnameserver can get a copy of the nation’s top level DNS data. This was detected by the TL;DR Project – an effort to attempt zone transfers against all top level domain (TLD) nameservers every two hours and keep a running Github repo with the resulting data. This data gives us a better picture of North Korea’s domains and top level DNS.
As soon as the post was made, many of the pages including a travel guide, cooking website, and social website called friend.com were taken down. However, the people were quite quick to post the screenshots on Reddit, and we are going to share them below.
This one seems to be a social networking website.
This one is country’s maritime landing page.
Here is a travel website for the people who are crazy enough to travel there.
Another tour booking website, probably for the locals’ leisure!
Believe it or not, they do have universities as well.
Here is the sports’ site :
A website detailing about Korean food.
North Korean version of spiritual guidelines.
News/Propaganda website.
A site of the fund collection for elderly people.
The Pyongyang International Film Festival homepage.
There were many other screenshots as well. All of them proved that these websites are created by the governing body as propaganda tools.
Doug Madory, a researcher at Dyn company that looks into global web use, commented on the leaks and said,
“We didn’t think there was much in the way of internet resources in North Korea, and according to these leaked zone files, we were right.”
Try accessing some of these websites yourself and post the screenshots below!