North Korea Accidently Reveals its Internet; Has Only 28 Websites

By S. Rina / 1474480390
(Photo : GettyImages/Sean Gallup) North Korea has only 28 registered domains.

North Korea accidently gave the entire world access its internet this week. The leak revealed that the country's internet consists of only 28 registered domains.

The leak happened on Monday, at 10 p.m. (Pacific Time). North Korea's nameserver, containing data about ".kp" domain sites, was misconfigured. The bug allowed the server to be accessed.

According to CNBC, the loophole was exploited by Matthew Bryant, a researcher, who accessed the data and dumped it on Github. Some of the sites with the ".kp" domain are reportedly inaccessible while some others take a long time to load.

Some of the sites using the ".kp" domain are Friend, Air Koryo, and Kim Il Sung University. There were other sites dealing with topics such as cookery and insurance services.

Korea's internet is suspected to have suffered a DDoS attack in December 2014, when it went offline for nine and a half hours.

Motherboard reported that most of the websites look to be bare bones. Doug  Madory, a researcher at Dyn, revealed that "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."

Globally, there are more than 140 million ".com" and ".net" domains on the internet. The number swells up further if country code domains are included in the count. Some of the biggest country codes are ".cn" for China and ".de" for Germany. The country domain code for North Korea is .kp.