Technology is great. Almost all the time, but when things go haywire, there are problems. The U.S. Department of Defense is living that reality in real time after discovering an exposed server that was dumping internal U.S. military emails to the open internet for a couple of weeks.
The malfunctioning server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for DOD customers. This is where sensitive but unclassified data is shared. Roughly three terabytes of internal military emails were exposed. Most of them pertained to USSOCOM (U.S. Special Operations Command), which works on special military operations.
TechCrunch was alerted of the leak by a security researcher named Anurag Sen, and the Pentagon was notified of this issue by TechCrunch.
The exposed email messages go back years and contain sensitive personal and health info of personnel with security clearances. TechCrunch has examined a limited amount of data, and what they’ve seen did not appear to be classified, or this would be a much bigger issue.
Ken McGraw, a spokesperson for USSOCOM, told TechCrunch they are looking into what happened.
“We can confirm at this point is no one hacked U.S. Special Operations Command’s information systems.”
A high priority of the internal investigation is seeing if any sensitive info wound up in the hands of Beijing, Moscow, or North Korea officials.
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