A simple spelling error in military communications caused thousands of Pentagon emails to be sent directly to the Russian-allied nation of Mali…and the US government knew about this for nearly a decade! If ever there was a case for the importance of proofreading emails, this is it.
The US military uses the suffix “.mil” at the end of its email addresses—but if that suffix is incorrectly typed as “.ml,” the email will be redirected to the domain used by the government of the West African nation of Mali. Although none of the compromised Pentagon emails were marked as classified, the message flow still contained sensitive information including travel itineraries, passwords, staff and crew lists for military bases and ships, maps and photos of various installations, legal documents, and medical details about military members and contractors.
Officials believe that the leaked Pentagon emails pose a threat to military personnel and leave the US vulnerable to cyberattacks, although there is no evidence of this happening yet.
But to make matters worse, the Pentagon has been aware of this problem since at least 2013.
As the Financial Times initially reported, a Dutch internet entrepreneur named Johannes Zuurbier first became aware of the issue when his company was contracted to run the .ml domain for the Malian government. Zuurbier first brought the issue to America’s attention in 2013 but did not receive any meaningful response. In January of this year, he began collecting the emails in hopes of convincing the US government to respond. Since January alone, he received more than 117,000 emails, with as many as 1,000 showing up in a single day.
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Zuurbier’s contract with Mali is set to expire later this year and he worries about the consequences of the Malian government having direct access to the domain before the issue is resolved. Russia has been highly active in Mali, forging an alliance with the African nation, which makes the leaked Pentagon emails that much more concerning.
The Pentagon responded to the new reports, claiming they’ve taken steps to mitigate the problem.
“We’re aware of these unauthorized disclosures of controlled national security information,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said last Monday. “As you’ve seen from when we had our first unauthorized disclosure from earlier this year, we’ve implemented policy and training mechanisms and put them in place.”
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr Tim Gorman further stated that the Department of Defense “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously.” According to Gorman, hundreds of .ml addresses have been blocked and additional training has been implemented for staff, which will hopefully address the problem in the future.
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