Late September 19th for reasons unknown webpages of the DPRK’s national domain .KP became available to users all over the world. This event is unique because the closeness of North Korean regime is fully applied to the Internet as well. The country has some kind of internal network, access to the global network is opened only to elected representatives of the ruling elite; third-party access to the North Korean .KP resources is impossible as well.
However, the cyber security expert at Uber Matthew Bryant discovered that a possibility suddenly appeared. He gave the request to the domain server ns2.kptc.kp of the North Korean Post and Telecommunications Corp. He found out that performing an AFXR request for zone transfer allows getting a copy of the DPRK’s DNS data of the .KP domain. Bryant found that the domain .KP has only 28 names. Experts hurried to study North Korean web pages; they sarcastically state that their design and functionality resemble European or American resources 20 years ago.
Access to North Korean web pages was opened probably because of a technical mistake during the resetting of one of the top level DNS servers. However, it’s noteworthy that the mistake hasn’t been eliminated yet. GitHub publishes information on the incident and gives a full list of available North Korean webpages. Most of them remain accessible at the time the article was written. What’s also interesting many North Korean webpages have versions for users that speak foreign languages, including Russian. It should be noted though that the servers are weak, therefore they cannot cope with sudden influx of curious people from all over the world and therefore load very slowly.
