28 Sep North Korea Accidentally Let’s The World Access It’s Internet And Everyone’s Freaking Out

North Korea is famously the world’s most secretive country. So, when the “hermit kingdom” accidentally opened the gateway to their internet, the world couldn’t help but go exploring.

However, a frolic in North Korea’s exposed internet wasn’t quite the adventure many expected, as the controversial country only has 28 heavily monitored websites…

On Monday, at approximately 10pm, North Korea’s nameserver misconfigured, allowing it to be accessed by anyone who dared. One person who didn’t hesitate in snooping around was researcher, Matthew Bryant, who managed to access the sites and obtain the, usually classified, data.

Communications in North Korea is controlled by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, with only a handful of elite users and scientists allowed access to the internet. Other citizens are allowed to use a heavily monitored and controlled intranet system, which only allows access to a select few websites which is maintained and monitored by the government.

So, when it was discovered that North Korea’s “walled garden intranet system” could be accessed, people were understandably intrigued…

Among the 28 websites were: ‘Air Koryo’, a national airline. ‘Friend’, presumably a social networking platform, which is exclusive to North Korean citizens. ‘Cooks’, a cookery website showcasing only North Korean dishes and ‘Korean Central News Agency’, a state run propaganda site.

Despite the small volume of sites, those that do exist are painfully slow to load. In fact, many of the sites were not functioning at all yesterday, presumably unprepared for the mass volume of traffic that they experienced when Bryant informed the world of the misconfiguration, allowing anyone to access the isolated country’s internet.

Most of the websites detail the “Supreme Leader’s Activities”. However, it is not clear if any of these reports are true, as Martyn Williams, who runs the website North Korea Tech from San Fransisco, explains:

“These websites are really there to push North Korea’s voice on the global stage, as if it is a normal member of the international community,” says Mr Williams. We never know if any of it’s true as there’s no way to verify it independently”.

All of the websites are extremely basic in design, and often take a prolonged time to open – something rarely experienced by internet users across the world in these modern times. To the uninformed eye, the North Korean sites could easily be mistaken for Western pages from 2005, or earlier.

The news sites are updated daily, purely with state propaganda reports, mainly focussing on the country’s controversial leader, Kim Jong-un, which include stories of him visiting a fruit farm in amongst a mass of reports centred around weapon testing.

Other websites include one that allows users to watch North Korean films and one which only reports on sports news – the North Korean teams only.

The world is slowly awakening to the harsh regime that has reigned over North Korea for decades, where the people are often starving, brainwashed and extremely violated by the government who controls them.

Although, one thing the people of North Korea can be thankful of is that they don’t have access to Donald Trump’s tweets.

What else are North Korea hiding from the world? This video tells you everything you need to know about the “hermit kingdom”:

It’s no surprise President Trump recently places North Korea on the USA’s travel ban, but when you consider how many people must be desperate to leave Jong-un’s repressive dictatorship, it’s also very sad they’ll never experience true freedom.

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