US military emails with ‘sensitive information’ sent to Mali. Here's how

Millions of US military emails that contained highly sensitive information were redirected to the West African country Mali, CNN reported, due to confusion owing to domain name used for sending them. The US military uses “.MIL” domain and the mails were being sent to “.ML,” the domain for Mali, the report claimed. Sensitive information including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and travel details of top officers was sent to Mali government’s official email ID, it said.

The mistake happened multiple times as the first instance was reported almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier- a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain. Since January 2023, close to 117,000 misdirected messages have been received, the entrepreneur said. Almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone, Johannes Zuurbier who has approached US officials repeatedly, claimed.

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The Amsterdam-based entrepreneur approached a senior adviser to the US national cyber security service and even White House officials to inform them about the mistake. In July, he sent a letter saying, “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.”

One email this year even included the travel plans for General James McConville, the chief of staff of the US Army and his delegation for a then visit to Indonesia, he claimed.

US said that it is aware of the situation and will revert to Mali’s government,a close Russia ally. Lt. Commander Tim Gorman, a spokesman for the Pentagon, told Financial Times 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”.

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", the spokesman informed.

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