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Sam - September 26, 2016
A recent leak of North Korea’s websites has caused all 28 of the secretive state’s government run websites to stop functioning.
The websites, each of which ends in the countries .kp address, cover a range of topics from recipes and North Korean film to social networks.
The websites crash has been caused after a GitHub website user uploaded the address of each of the countries websites.
The network seemed to struggle with the unexpectedly high amount of traffic after the leak, which has caused the sites to be down ever since.
While most of the websites were known before the leak, the GitHub user was able to take advantage of a mistake that allowed curious users to find all websites that use the .kp ending and as such, all of North Korea’s websites.
To put this into context Germany has sixteen million websites that end in .de while even the computer game Grand Theft Auto Five outdoes North Korea with a total of 83 websites available to view on the game’s internet.
Of course, due to the secretive nature of the communist state, use of the real internet in North Korea is incredibly rare.
Most people in the country with internet access can only use sites on the Kwangmyong intranet. This is a closed off intranet that allows access to government approved sites that likely numbers in the thousands.