Millions of American Military Emails Leaked Because of Typo

by Chris Black

How incompetent is this government, actually?

How are we supposed to trust these people to run the world?

LMAO: US military emails end with “.mil” -> Mali’s emails end with “.ml”

Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a “typo leak” that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel… pic.twitter.com/foaF08GAsl

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) July 17, 2023

Financial Times:

Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a “typo leak” that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers. Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses.

The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain. Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take the issue seriously. He holds close to 117,000 misdirected messages — almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter he sent to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote: “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.”