North Korea Launches Internet Portal With Local Servers Hosting All Content – By Pritha Paul (ibtimes.com) / Oct 10 2018
North Korea has opened an Internet portal that houses links to all the websites that can officially be accessed by citizens of the nation.
Since North Korea does not typically announce the launch of web portals or new sites publicly, there was no way of knowing when the portal actually went live. Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team, said they came across the portal for the first time Oct. 5, North Korea Tech reported.
“When North Korea brings up a new website they never publicize it. Either someone finds it by accident or it might show up in a search engine,” said Martyn Williams who runs the website North Korea Tech from San Francisco, BBC News reported. “We knew about most of these, but weren’t sure what else existed”.
The site is called “DPRK Portal,” which displays links to 34 web sites, some of them directing people to the sections of the same website. Out of the displayed links, only 29 directed people to verified unique domain names.
The portal only carried links of sites which were officially controlled by the state media. This meant semiofficial sites like Uriminzokkri, which are run by North Koreans in China and backed by Pyongyang government were not displayed on the portal.
On the other hand, lesser-known North Korean sites such as the Financial Intelligence Agency, Mirae science site and the Samhung Intellectual Assets Center of the Education Ministry were included on the portal.
It also supported a search engine of its own, although it was not an advanced one. It was only capable of detecting keywords that appeared on the indexes of the websites and did not cover the content of those websites.
The page was created by Ryugyong Computer, the company which runs Media Ryugyong site in North Korea, and displays photos and videos from the nation.
In October last year, Madory and his team discovered North Korea got a new Internet connection — provided by the Russian firm TransTeleCom — which supplemented a connection run by China Unicom that has operated since 2010. The new connection came with a higher bandwidth capacity as well as better firewall protection which let it withstand advanced cyber-attacks.
“In practical terms, [having multiple connections] will allow additional resiliency if one of those connections were to be rendered inactive for any number of reasons,” Madory said, the Washington Post reported.
Bryce Boland, cybersecurity firm FireEye’s chief technology office for the Asia-Pacific region, told Reuters at the time the new connection “will improve the resiliency of their network and increase their ability to conduct command and control over those activities.”
Internet under North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime has always been restricted. Even in 21st century, the nation boasts two versions of the world wide web — the first one is comparatively less limited but can only be accessed by governmental elites and certain high-ranking personalities in different industries, and the second one is for common use by the masses and is sort of a broader intranet which is heavily curated by state media and used as a vehicle for governmental propaganda.
North Korea has opened an Internet portal that houses links to all the websites that can officially be accessed by citizens of the nation. This photo illustration shows a person in Seoul pointing to a computer screen page of the North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun displaying news of North Korea’s Musudan missile test the day before, June 23, 2016. Photo: Getty Images/ JUNG YEON-JE
