Several Sensitive U.S. Military Emails Sent To Mali By Accident

According to a report by the Financial Times, an error has caused millions of emails related to the US military to be transferred in the past ten years to Mali, a West African nation that is allied with Russia. People frequently type.ML, the country identifier for Mali, instead of adding the military’s.MIL domain to their recipient’s email address.

The Financial Times quotes Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch businessman hired to oversee Mali’s domain, as saying that despite his repeated attempts to alert the US government, this has been going on for more than ten years. Zuurbier set up a mechanism to catch these misdirected emails when he noticed requests for nonexistent domains like army.ml and navy.ml. However, according to the Financial Times, this system “was rapidly overwhelmed and stopped collecting messages.”

Zuurbier is said to have identified 117,000 misdirected emails since January alone, some of which contained private information about the US military. The Financial Times claims that a large number of emails contain personal information such as tax returns, lists of ship crews, tax information, lists of military base staff, lists of personnel at military facilities, and more.

The Financial Times has reported that some of the misdirected emails were sent by military personnel, travel brokers who work with the US military, US intelligence, commercial contractors, and others. For instance, the travel schedule for General James McConville, the chief of staff of the US Army, for his visit to Indonesia, was purportedly included in an email from earlier this year. A “full list of room numbers” and “details of the collection of McConville’s room key at the Grand Hyatt Jakarta” were included in the email.

However, Zuurbier won’t be able to gain access to these emails for much longer. His 10-year contract with Mali expires on Monday, at which point the emails will be accessible to Mali’s government. Through the Wagner Group, a paramilitary group funded by the Russian government that just staged an uprising against President Vladimir Putin, Russia established a presence in Mali last year. The Wagner Group allegedly wanted to utilize Mali as a route to send military supplies to Ukraine, according to the US State Department in May.

Tim Gorman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in an email said that “The Department of Defense (DoD) is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously,”, Gorman adds that emails sent from a .mil domain to Mali are “blocked” and that the “sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipient.

However, Gorman admits that this does not prevent other government organizations or others collaborating with the US government from sending emails to Malian addresses by accident. Nevertheless, he states that “the Department continues to direct and train DoD personnel.”