Reddit Brings Down North Korea's Entire Internet (mirror.co.uk)

After a North Korean system administrator misconfigured its nameserver allowing anyone to query it and get the list of the domains that exist for .kp, it was revealed that the secretive country only has 28 websites. That's 28 websites for a country with nearly 25 million people. Naturally, the story was published all across the web, including on Reddit, which resulted in a high number of users visiting North Korea's websites. Mirror.co.uk reports: When a list of North Korea's available websites was posted on Reddit, the surge of visitors to the reclusive state's online offering overloaded the servers. North Korea runs a completely locked-down version of the internet that consists of only 28 "websites" that the population is allowed to view. However, a technical slip-up allowed a GitHub user to work their way into the country's computer network and view the websites from the outside. As the GitHub user puts it: "One of North Korea's top level name servers was accidentally configured to allow global [Domain Name System] transfers. This allows anyone who performs [a zone transfer request] to the country's ns2.kptc.kp name server to get a copy of the nation's top level DNS data." Pretty soon, links to all the websites were posted on Reddit, where thousands of visitors took the opportunity to see what the web looks like from Pyongyang. Reddit's surge of traffic isn't the first time North Korea's internet has been knocked out. In 2014, the country suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that was believed to have originated from the U.S. Redditor BaconBakin points out that while North Korea has 28 websites, GTA V has 83 websites. They added, "I think it's safe to say that San Andreas is more technologically advanced than North Korea."

Comments

I hope Reddit is happy. That dude is probably dead

[SensitiveMale]

Not kidding. When I was in specialized military training program we saw crazy looking dude with a unkempt uniform and absolutely no personal hygiene. We made a couple snide remarks amongst ourselves and later mentioned the guy to an instructor.

He told us that the guy was from Saudi Arabia. He also told us that every foreigner in the school always passed. A few years back, he didn't specify how many, a Saudi officer took the course and failed. The government beheaded him and apologized to the school.

So, good job Reddit. If he had a family, their probably gone as well.

Re:someone probably died for this mistake

[barc0001]

Why is this being rated funny? It's probably true. Or if not, then they ended up in a "work camp".