FT: Millions of US Army emails sent to Mali due to typo
Millions of US Army emails are mistakenly sent to the Government of Mali due to a typo in the domain suffix. This was reported on July 17 by the Financial Times newspaper with reference to Johannes Zurbier, a Dutch Internet entrepreneur who signed a contract to manage the domain of an African country.
Some of these letters contained confidential information about employees, and the United States is concerned about the close ties between Russia and Mali, the publication added.
According to Zurbier, mail traffic continues to be directed to the domain.ml, which is the identifier of the country of Mali, as a result of an erroneous input of the suffix .mil, which denotes all email addresses of US military personnel.
It was planned that control of the .ml domain would be transferred from Zurbier's company to the Government of Mali, and after the expiration of the 10-year contract for domain management, the Malian authorities would be able to collect emails mistakenly sent to them during these years.
"The risk is real and can be used by US adversaries," he wrote, adding that only in the past six months since January 2023, approximately 117 thousand messages have been transmitted by mistake.
This is not the first time Zurbier has addressed American officials about the problem of mass mail leaks, including through the defense attache in Mali.
Most of the emails are spam, where no such letter is marked as secret, but some messages contain data about American servicemen, contractors and their family members, the newspaper notes.
"It's one thing when you encounter a domain owner who is trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to identify a problem. It's completely different with a foreign government, which can regard it as an advantage that can be used," Michael Rogers, the former head of the US National Security Agency, told the newspaper. According to him, cases of sending messages by mistake to the wrong address due to a typo are not uncommon.
Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Tim Gorman said that the agency is aware of the problem. According to him, emails sent from the .mil domain to Malian addresses are "blocked even before they leave the .mil domain."
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