Wrong Delivery: Sensitive US Military Emails Reach Russian Ally Due to Typo – News18

Millions of US military emails were mistakenly sent to Mali, a West African nation which is also a Russian ally. The reason for the mistake – a minor typing error.

The US military uses the (.mil) domain and have been doing so for years and the domain for the Malian government has been the (.ml) suffix. Reports by the Financial Times and the BBC said that some of the emails contained sensitive information such as “passwords, medical records and the itineraries of top officers”.

The Pentagon said steps were taken to address the issue.

Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier told the Financial Times that he identified the problem over a decade ago. Zuurbier has been managing the Malian domain since 2013 and has collected tens of thousands of misdirected emails.

The Financial Times report said that even though the mails were not classified, they ended up having medical data, maps of American military facilities, financial records, diplomatic messages and planning documents for official trips.

Zuurbier informed US officials this month as his contract with the Malian government will expire soon which means that after his departure these mails could be exploited by adversaries of the US.

The Malian military government, according to the newspaper, will take control of the domain on Monday.

Lee McKnight, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University, told the BBC that the US should consider itself lucky that its military was informed of the issue at the earliest.

He also pointed out that they were also fortunate that these emails went to the Malian domain, instead of cyber-criminals.

Steven Stransky, a lawyer who worked earlier with the Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence Law Division, told the BBC, even if the emails did not contain classified information, seemingly harmless information, like personal or medical details of military personnel can be misused by adversaries.

“Those sorts of communications would mean that a foreign actor can start building dossiers on our own military personnel, for espionage purposes, or could try to get them to disclose information in exchange for financial benefit,” Steven Stransky was quoted as saying by the BBC.