One typo has been misdirecting US military email to West Africa for years.
Email typos are incredibly common, which is why the built-in spell check for email services is so popular. But when there’s a typo in the recipient’s email address, it can lead to more trouble than a typo in the message body. This is especially concerning when the misdirected email comes from a large corporation — or, in this case, from the United States military.
As reported by Ars Technica, a typo has led to millions of sensitive US military emails being misdirected to a company that manages Mali’s internet domain. The error is caused by the similarity between the .MIL and .ML domains, which are used for US military and Malian email addresses, respectively.
The misdirected emails contain sensitive information, such as diplomatic documents, tax returns, and passwords. Mali is a country in West Africa closely allied with Russia, so this kind of mistake is a pretty big deal. Luckily, the company that received the misdirected emails is not a government entity: Mali Dili, a Dutch firm that manages Mali’s top-level domain, received the communications.
Mali Dili has been aware of the typo leak for almost a decade, and it has tried to warn the US government about the problem. However, it appears not much has been done to fix the issue, so for many years this typo has sent military emails to Mali. What has made this worse is the transfer of control of the .ML domain from Mali Dili to Mali’s government on Monday. This means that the misdirected emails could be gathered by Mali’s government going forward.
According to the report, there is a large amount of spam in the email flow, and no classified emails are present. There are, however, some messages containing highly sensitive information about serving US military personnel, contractors, and their families. Over 117,000 misdirected messages have been sent in total.
The Pentagon has said that emails sent directly from the .MIL domain to Malian addresses are blocked. However, based on what has just been reported, either some emails can work their way through or this blocking was very recently put into place.
Source: Android Police
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