GTA V Has More Domains Than North Korea

Those of you who follow international news might have heard of the recent blunder which resulted in North Korea's secured internal "internet" becoming temporarily accessible from outside the nation. Those of you who don't follow international news, I don't blame you, because there is a whole lot of senseless killing and over-chewed political commentary going on out there. However, this North Korean internet leak has been linked to GTA V in a rather odd manner.

The mere fact that North Korea had some kind of internal internet network only became common knowledge about two years ago, when news of it having been hacked circulated. In spite of this, the intranet called "Bright", running on the "Red Star 3.0" operating system (seriously) has been shrouded in mystery, with even the foreign consultants and specialists called in to maintain it barred from access.

Initially, it was estimated that Bright possessed between 1,000 and 5,500 individual domains, maintained by various governmental bodies, state-owned companies and others. North Korea does in fact have — albeit extremely limited, censored, and monitored — access to the "real" world wide web, barely any use it in the country, seeing as pretty much no-one owns has their own computer.

One of North Korea’s top level name servers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS 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.

However after a recent glitch in the system, the outside world was given temporary access. Naturally, the hole was quickly plugged, but the cat was out of the bag, and now the entire North Korean intranet has been posted all over the internet. All 28 domains of it.

For the record, GTA V has a total of 83 in-game websites. GTA IV had even more. This was pointed out by Redditors LefthandedLunatic and BaconBakin in this (rather entertaining) comment thread under the post which leads to the GitHub page containing all of the data extracted from the Bright leak.

While websites in GTA V are dedicated to cults, supercar purchases, weapons, video games, social media, Power Rangers spoof shows, strip clubs and political campaigns, North Korea dedicates its limited intranet space for sites about its airline company, film industry, and a constantly updated feed describing pretty much every nonclassified action of the great leader Kim Jong Un. This tidbit of news has been making almost as many rounds on the internet as the fact of the North Korean intranet leak itself.

Are you surprised that GTA V has more domains than North Korea?