In an apparent error, North Korea accidentally opened access to every website hosted on its servers, revealing that it only has 28 registered domains.
North Korea’s “.kp” nameserver was apparently misconfigured, according to researcher, Matthew Bryant, who said he could access the domain names and data about the websites. He dumped his findings on Github, a site that hosts code. A Reddit page was also created, which includes a list and description of the websites.
According to Verisign, approximately 149.9 million websites have country codes, such as “.us” for the United States, “.mx” for Mexico, or “.in” for India.
As of Thursday, many of the websites had apparently gone down.
“Now we have a complete list of domain names for the country and it’s surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) very small,” Bryant told Motherboard.
North Korea’s state-run Internet is blocked off from the rest of the world.
“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,” Doug Madory, a researcher at Dyn, a firm that monitors internet use, added to Motherboard.
Many of the websites aren’t much to look at and are quite banal, with with North Korean communist propaganda sprinkled in for good measure.
Here are the websites in full, according to the Reddit list:
http://airkoryo.com.kp - Air Koryo. A flight ticket website.
http://cooks.org.kp - Korean Dishes. Culinary website with recipes.
http://friend.com.kp - Friend. Appears to be something similar to Yahoo and MSN.
http://gnu.rep.kp - National Unity. A sort of religious group or well-being group.
http://kass.org.kp - Korean Association of Social Scientists. Not sure, but I think it’s an education website for both school and adult education courses maybe.
http://kcna.kp - Korean Central News Agency. Yet another news website.
http://kiyctc.com.kp - Korean International Youth and Children’s Travel Company. I guess a travel company of both youth and children.
http://knic.com.kp - Korean People Total Insurance Company. Insurance company.
http://koredufund.org.kp - Korea Education Fund. Appears to be a charity to increase the quality of education.
http://korelcfund.org.kp - Korea Elderly Care Fund. A charity for the elderly.
http://korfilm.com.kp - KorFilms - Pyongang International Film Festival. The film website.
http://ma.gov.kp - Maritime Administration of Korea. Laws of the water can be found here.
http://masikryong.com.kp - currently can’t access
http://naenara.com.kp - Naenara. - This is actually the “official” government site in the sense of a description of the country. It has plenty of news articles but it contains a decent amount of (tourist oriented?) information about the country
http://nta.gov.kp - Korea Tourism. The Korean Tourism board, looks like you can get tours from here.
http://portal.net.kp - currently can’t access
http://rcc.net.kp - currently can’t access
http://rep.kp - currently can’t access
http://rodong.rep.kp - Rodong. Official news website. Click here to view the Rodong website in the user-friendly Western version, thanks again to /u/tinoh124 for this.
http://ryongnamsan.edu.kp - Kim Il Sung University. - The university’s website.
http://sdprk.org.kp - Sports Chosun. - The sports website.
http://silibank.net.kp - currently can’t access
http://star-co.net.kp - currently can’t access
http://star-di.net.kp - currently can’t access
http://star.co.kp - currently can’t access
http://star.edu.kp - currently can’t access
http://star.net.kp - currently can’t access
http://vok.rep.kp - Voice Of Korea. A news website.
