A New Facebook Clone Hosted by North Korea

A New Facebook Clone Hosted by North Korea Came as a Surprise to Many

      As we live in an era where everyone can create a website, it is not surprising to know that a hermit kingdom like North Korea will use this to their own advantage, especially when it briefly got its Facebook clone.
The site referred to was hosted by starcon.net.kp. It resembles the multibillion dollar creation of Mark Zuckerberg. On this site, you can add friends and send messages to them. You can also upload photos and profile images once you have registered for an account.
     The platform was discovered by the web monitoring Dyn Research this Friday. They even showed some screenshots of the site on Twitter. North Korean sites are known to be hosted by Chinese servers but for this one, the server host is coming from North Korea itself.
     The site’s security is not so tight.  “I was even able to guess the site’s username and password”, Scottish 18 years old Andrew McKean said. He said it was similar to phpDolphin platform: “admin” and “password”.  McKean denied the allegation that he created the site and insisted that he only discovered the login.  He said he did this out of curiosity, considering that the site is new and there’s nothing much done to it as yet.

     However, the website is now offline and many are still wondering what this is for. Speculations flooded the social media and many think that this may be used in the future by North Korea as their social media platform. But until now, the answers to these questions remained unanswered.
We know that North Korea willfully walls itself from the rest of the world. A communist country that considers China as its only diplomatic ally limits its people from internet freedom. North Koreans cannot access reputable western websites. And only a few thousand of them (specifically the elites) are given access to worldwide internet.
     To access a computer, a North Korean must first ask for permission. Once allowed, they can use an intranet that has limited access to only few thousands of websites.
It is not new to the world that North Korea has been conducting suspicious activities for many years now. And majority of the country’s finances are spent for weapons and ammunitions.  Will launching a social media site and allowing this to roll around the world be a part of their plan? Whatever this may be, only North Korean leaders know for now. And the only thing we can do is to wait for the answer.