With more than 140 million .com and .net domains on the internet, web surfers have enough content to keep them busy for many lifetimes.
Most countries have a large number of websites registered with their respective country code top-level domain (ccTLD, in short), such as .cn for China or .uk for the United Kingdom.
Unless they are North Korea, that is.
The reclusive country stands out in this area, as details that recently surfaced are showing the number of domains registered to the country's servers. We already knew that North Korea is not a big fan of the internet and its "capitalist propaganda," but a recent leak spilled the beans on the exact number of websites that the country registered on its own top-level domain, .kp.
In the wake of an IT blunder in the dictatorship, experts from GitHub managed to access information about the websites hosted on the servers of the closed-off country.
It looks like internet users in North Korea have access to no more than 28 websites. For what it's worth, the number of internet users in the country is very tiny, as well.
GitHub said that the reason for the leak was that North Korea accidentally configured its top-level name servers such that it permitted "global [Domain Name System] transfers."
This meant that users who managed to perform a zone transfer request to the country's ns2.kptc.kp name server were able to receive a copy of the top-level DNS data of the nation.
The findings are nothing to be amazed by, as some sites are pretty self-obvious. Chefs in the country have access to Cooks.org.kp, a recipe site, while reporters have to rely on the national news agency, kcna.kp.
Web pages such as friend.com.kp seem to emulate Facebook. However, unlike the social media site that all the planet is using, the North Korean variant is very susceptible to hacking.
Keep in mind that a number of other sites were not accessible to users from outside the country.
Should you want to have a full perspective on the 28 sites of North Korea, check out the complete list on Reddit. As a humorous redditor underlines, a GTA V gamer can tap into 83 websites in-game, three times more than the average North Korean internet user can visit in real life.
This does not stop North Korea from being a culprit in state-sponsored hacking. This spring, South Korea's intelligence agency claimed that the North was involved in hacking the phones of senior government officials.
In 2014, the FBI said that North Korea was responsible for a hacking attack on Sony, but security experts disagreed.
