Slashdot Mirror

In September of 2014, NetCraft confirmed there to be over 1 billion websites on the world wide web. There are over 140 million .com and .net domains alone, as well as millions of websites for each country code top-level domain (ccTLD), such as .de for Germany and .cn for China. But in North Korea, the number of websites the country has registered for its top-level domain is in the double digits. Motherboard reports: On Tuesday, apparently by mistake, North Korea misconfigured its nameserver, essentially a list that holds information on all of the domains that exist for .kp, allowing anyone to query it and get the list. In other words, a snafu by North Korea's system administrators allowed anyone to ask the country's nameserver: "can I have all of your information on this domain?" and get an answer, giving everyone a peek into the strange world of North Korea's web. North Korea has only 28 registered domains, according to the leaked data. "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," Doug Madory, a researcher at Dyn, a company that monitors internet use and access around the world, told Motherboard. Some of the sites aren't reachable, perhaps because after Bryant discovered them, they are being deluged with traffic.