A report shared today by the Financial Times (FT) reveals that the US military has made a mind-blowing mistake for over a decade. According to the report, millions of military-related emails were mistakenly sent to the West African country of Mali, an ally of Russia.
The reason behind this occurrence is a minor typo. For a long time, people often wrote “.ML”, which is from Mali, instead of “.MIL”, which is the domain of the US military. For this reason, the mails were sent to Mali, not to the desired destinations.
The error, which led to the leak of many sensitive information, persisted despite the US warnings many times over the years.
Dutchman Johannes Zuurbier, who took on the task of managing Mali’s domain name, told FT that they had warned the US government many times; but it stated that the error persists. Zuurbier set up a system to catch misdirected emails after noticing non-existent domains.
According to Zuurbier, 117,000 falsely sent emails were detected in January alone. It was also included in the incoming information that these e-mails contained sensitive information. According to the report, many of the emails included health records, identification information, personnel lists of military bases, photos of the bases, tax records and more.
It was also stated that the e-mails were sent from places such as travel agencies working with the military, military personnel. For example, one of the e-mails included details of a itinerary of US Joint Chiefs of Staff James McConville to Indonesia.
Zuurbier says his 10-year contract expires today and he can no longer block emails. In other words, the Malian authorities will have access to these e-mails. Tim Gorman, spokesman for the US Department of Defense, stated that they are aware of the problem and take the issue seriously. Gorman added that inadvertently sent e-mails were blocked and informed senders to verify addresses.
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