It has been revealed that confidential documents of US Department of Defense personnel were delivered to Mali by mistake for more than a decade owing to a misspelling. According to The Financial Times, some Pentagon emails were routed to addresses in Mali with the “.ml” extension rather than the “.mil” address, which corresponds to US military correspondence. As a result, hundreds of sensitive documents were sent to the wrong addresses.
This was discovered by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who had a contract to administer Mali’s domain name. According to Zuurbier, the misdirected emails have been going on for more than ten years, despite numerous attempts to inform the US authorities.
Zuurbier reportedly banned more than 117,000 misdirected emails in January alone, many of which included sensitive information concerning US military personnel. Medical records, identity document information, personnel lists at military bases, images of military bases, navy inspection reports, ship crew lists, tax records, and other sensitive information were allegedly contained in the emails.
According to Tim Gorman, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, they are aware of the issue and take all unauthorized disclosures of restricted national security material or regulated unclassified information seriously.
