7 websites North Korea didn’t want you to see

And while the North Korean authorities quickly closed off access to the sites, the internet was already awash with information about the pages.

“Now we have a complete list of domain names for the country and it’s surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) very small”, Bryant told Motherboard in an email.

An accidental leak of all North Korea’s propaganda websites, has provided global internet users with some penetrating insights into the secretive nation’s internet infrastructure.

North Korea has only 28 registered domains.

Military experts raise concerns that North Korea is moving closer toward obtaining the ability to put nuclear warheads on a variety of its ballistic missiles, a growing arsenal that one day may include a reliable weapon that could reach the USA mainland. The glitch allowed sharp-eyed outsiders to essentially follow a digital trail to the list of all internet domain names with the North Korea tag:.kp.

According to reports, all of the 28.kp domains of North Korea have accidentally been made available for everyone, letting foreigners look at the way the country is run.

In a world that is increasingly globally interconnected with websites and domains, we have more than 140 million.com and.net domains to surf. (Links can be found at the GitHub post and at the Reddit thread on the topic here.) There’s also a website for Air Koryo, North Korea’s state-owned airline, the Maskiryong ski resort, and more.

The most recent headlines on the Rodong Sinmun website includes: “Congratulations to our veteran scientists” and “Drug-related death, increasing among young South-Koreans”.

The number of sites is notable, but their contents are the most telling.

Bryant said he caught the error and downloaded the data because he scans all top-level domains for exactly these sort of issues. Despite the websites being seemingly conceptualized to represent the various facets of North Korea, some of them are exclusively dedicated to nothing but obsessing on the cult around the leader Kim Jong-un and his family.