Thousands of US military emails mistakenly sent to Russian ally Mali due to ‘typo’

A mere “typo” led millions of US military emails that contained highly sensitive information to be redirected to Mali, a West African country which is an ally of Russia.

The confusion seems to have arisen due to the domain name for sending emails. While the US military uses “.MIL” domain, the mails were being sent to “.ML,” the domain for Mali.

As a result, sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords, and travel details of top officers, were sent erroneously to the Mali government’s official email ID.

Happened multiple times

But what is concerning is that it has happened multiple times, with the first instance being reported almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain, the Financial Times (FT) newspaper reported.

Since January this year, Zuurbier claims to have collected close to 117,000 misdirected messages, with almost 1,000 arriving on Wednesday alone.

One email that was misdirected to Mali this year included the travel plans for General James McConville, the chief of staff of the US Army, and his delegation for a then-forthcoming visit to Indonesia in May.

He has been trying to get incontact with the US officials to apprise them of the grave error.

The Amsterdam-based entrepreneur approached US officials repeatedly, including through a defence attaché in Mali, a senior adviser to the US national cyber security service, and even White House officials.

In July, he sent a letter to the US writing, “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.”

Till Sunday, the .ML domain was being handled by Zuurbier due to the 10-year contract, which expired on Monday.

US says aware of situation

It will revert to Mali’s government, which is closely allied with Russia, and might allow it to gain access to the millions of misdirected emails.

Responding to the matter, Lt. Commander Tim Gorman, a spokesman for the Pentagon, told FT that the Department of Defence “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorised disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously”.

He further said that emails sent directly from the .mil domain to Malian addresses “are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients”.

(With inputs from agencies)

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