There has been a very serious security breach in the US intelligence community. Hundreds of thousands of emails prepared by the Pentagon were forwarded to another email address due to a typo. This led to the disclosure of highly sensitive information.
Hundreds of thousands of Pentagon emails forwarded to Mali
According to new documents leaked to the US press, a remarkable error has been going on at the Pentagon for about 10 years. It was found that when military documents were sent by email, they were sent to “.ML”, the extension of Mali, instead of the domain name “.MIL”.
The people who sent the documents to the wrong address at the Pentagon created a huge exploit. Johannes Zuurbier, the Internet entrepreneur responsible for managing Mali’s country domain name, said the situation had not led to any leaks so far.
To encourage the US to address the problem, Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January. He says he has now received more than 100,000 emails from the Pentagon and that his contract is about to end.
Zuurbier will be replaced by the government of Mali, which has close ties to Russia. This means that emails sent to .ML instead of .MIL will be directly visible to the Russian government.
While most of the emails are spam, some messages contain sensitive information about US military personnel and their families. These include diplomatic cables, tax returns, passwords, travel information and medical records.
Tim Gorman, a Pentagon spokesman, acknowledged the problem and said they take the disclosure of national security information seriously. However, he said they were working to automatically block emails sent to the .ML domain.
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