A security threat has been created by the unintentional transmission of millions of private US military emails to Mali. Since January, Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch entrepreneur, has been gathering the misdirected emails, and he has now gathered over 117,000.
Due to a typing error, millions of highly private US military emails were routed to Mali. Given that Mali is a close friend of Russia, the stolen emails could pose a serious threat to the US.
Due to a conflict between Mali and the US military, emails were sent in the wrong direction. Mali uses the ‘.ml’ domain as the nation identification, whereas the US military uses the .mil suffix.
The Financial Times reported that Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier, who oversees the domain for Mali, was the one who initially raised attention to the problem.
In an effort to get the US to take the situation seriously on US military emails, Zuurbier has frequently spoken with high-ranking officials, including the White House, the US national cyber security service’s senior senior adviser, and the defense A big attaché in Mali.
A big warning for the US military with regards to US military emails: “Risk is real.”
“This risk is genuine and could be abused by US adversaries.” According to the FT, Zuubier wrote in a letter to US authorities
Senior Pentagon officials said they are aware of the problem and are treating it seriously in the interim.
The Department of Defense “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously,” Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Commander Tim Gorman told the Financial Times.
Every email sent to Malian addresses, according to Gorman, “is blocked before it leaves the domain, and the sender is informed that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients.”
He added that while the use of personal email accounts for official activity cannot be technically prevented, DoD personnel are receiving the appropriate instruction and guidance.
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