Online security engineer Matt Bryant recently revealed a shocking reality about the real Internet status of reclusive state North Korea. Bryant revealed a list of websites that are permitted or accessible to North Korea, and despite what the state wants its citizens to know, it appears that North Korea only has access to 28 websites.
Bryant listed 28 websites, all of which ends in .kp top-level domain. That specific domain is associated with North Korea. Recent statistics show that about 149 million websites use country codes, like .cn for China or .de for Germany.
Bryant discovered the list while working on a GitHub project. Among the works he was tasked to do was to continuously query different parts of the Internet and report the results. Bryant's research was first published on GitHub as well.
Following its posting on GitHub, the list of North Korean websites made its way into popular forum Reddit, and from there the list was eventually shared on several websites until it reached the mainstream consciousness.
In a follow up report from Motherboard, the news outlet revealed that most of the websites that were part of the list were down or inaccessible. Many tech experts believe that overwhelming traffic may have cause the servers to crash.
According to NPR, a close inspection on the 28 websites reveal that most of which are used for propaganda, education, and news dissemination. One website using the domain friend.com.kp was tagged as a social media platform. Another site cooks.org.kp shared various recipes of Korean dishes. The two mentioned websites are inaccessible as of this writing.
In an email sent to Motherboard, Bryant shared, "Now we have a complete list of domain names for the country and it's surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) very small."
Despite this relatively small access to the Internet, some news outlets believe that North Korea has its own intranet service called Kwangmyong. This intranet service is only accessible within the North Korean borders and it is very much impossible for the outside work to access or hack into it.
