Is it because of "hand sliding"?, Million US military emails leaked to servers in other countries | US Department of Defense | US military
Recently, the media exposed a serious "black hole" incident involving the US military. A massive amount of US military emails, including some containing sensitive information, were sent to the African country of Mali. What exactly is going on here?
According to a report by the Financial Times on the 17th, millions of US military emails were mistakenly sent to Mali. The reason for the mistake was actually due to the sender's carelessness, as the exclusive domain names of the US military and Mali only differ by one English letter "i", and many people spelled the recipient's email address incorrectly.
The Financial Times reported that although these emails were not marked as classified, they still contain a lot of sensitive information, such as highly sensitive information of active US military officials, contractors, and their relatives, including personal medical data, identity file information, crew lists, base staff lists, facility maps, base photos, naval inspection reports, contracts, as well as military officers' business trips, financial records, and so on.
For example, in a mistakenly sent email this year, it included the itinerary of US Army Chief of Staff James McConnell's visit to Indonesia in May, listing the hotel room numbers and specific itinerary of McConnell and 20 others. An email from the Australian Ministry of Defense regarding the F-35 fighter jet was also sent to Mali for communication with the US side.
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In addition to some errors caused by external personnel such as travel agencies serving the US military, there are also many errors in sending emails from internal US military personnel. A FBI agent responsible for naval work attempted to forward six emails to his military mailbox, but instead sent them to Mali, one of which contained an urgent letter sent by a foreign diplomat to the US State Department. Some people also mistakenly sent emails to Mali to retrieve the password for the intelligence system and access the password for the Ministry of Defense's file system.
Can no one notice such a massive amount of mistakenly sent emails? It is reported that Zuerbir, a Dutch Internet entrepreneur responsible for helping Mali operate its national domain name, discovered this problem about 10 years ago. He reminded the US military at that time, but the problem has not been solved. Mistaken emails continue to appear. According to Zulbir's latest statistics, he has collected up to 117000 erroneous emails since January this year alone, of which nearly 1000 were received on July 12th alone.
John Kirby, Coordinator of Strategic Communications at the National Security Council of the United States: They have developed a network tool that has been in use for some time and can intercept emails with the wrong domain name. But there are not many ways to send emails to US military addresses from outside.
Retired Admiral Mike Rogers, who previously served as the head of the US National Security Agency and the US Army Cyberspace Command, said that if one could browse these emails for a long time, intelligence could be obtained even from non classified information. Rogers believes that the scale and duration of this incident, as well as the involvement of so much sensitive information, have exposed management issues for the US military.
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The US military email leak incident is not the first time
This is not the first time an email leak has occurred in the US military. In February of this year, multiple media outlets in the United States revealed that due to a configuration error on a server of the US Department of Defense, emails within the military were leaked. Non internal personnel can access the server with passwords, as long as they know the IP address of the US Department of Defense server and use a web browser to access the leaked email data. Many of the massive military emails contained in the servers with configuration errors are related to the US Special Operations Command. The emails on the server can be traced back several years and also contain personal information of some government employees.