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Misconfigured DNS Server Reveals That North Korea Has Only 28 Websites

After last week’s flyover, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency described the B-1B as an “ill-famed nuclear war means” and accused the United States of resorting to “nuclear threat and blackmail” against the North.

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North Korea is famously secretive and restrictive – the regime goes to great lengths to both prevent the outside world from learning what goes on there and prevent its citizens from learning about the outside world.

The reveal comes as a result of a configuration change in North Korea’s network that allowed the rest of the world access to its websites, typically restricted within the country’s geographical borders.

Researcher Matthew Bryant was the one who discovered there are only 28 websites registered to North Korea’s.kp domain.

The sites include a flight booking site, a recipe website (the new replacement for BBC Food perhaps?) and a film festival website, while several are inaccessible, throwing up DNS errors. There are many sites, which no one had been able to access.

As you may have already guessed, most of these 28 websites are government related.

Back in December 2014, the entire country’s internet, which is thought to be connected to the world via China, was taken offline for nine and a half hours, although no concrete reason was ever found. Not a rare finding, since North Korea goes to extreme – and nearly comedic – lengths to keep its people away from the global Internet. The misconfiguration allowed users to request information on the nation’s DNS data, which in turn revealed the country’s existing domains.

Most of the sites are unsophisticated and not as slick as their Western counterparts.

According to experts, despite the limited content, North Korea’s servers were not the most stable.

The GitHub post was made widely known through a Reddit stream, which contains a simplified list of websites and their intended use.

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Washington said the demonstration was “just one example of the full range of military capabilities” that the USA possessed to counter potential threats from North Korea in the face of the latter’s nuclear and missile tests.

Technology in North Korea has not advanced at the same pace as the rest of the world