We’ve all sent our fair share of embarrassing emails due to an unfortunate typo (never tell your colleague that they are “fart oo nice”).
However, the US military has been making a much more humiliating mistake; they’ve accidentally been sending sensitive emails to Mali.
And they haven’t just done it once, they have done it thousands of times over the last 10 years!
Here’s how they keep messing up their emails: official US military emails end with “.mil” – just like how South African emails end with “.za”. Here’s the thing, Malian emails end with “.ml”, so this simple typo has led to important military emails being sent over to Mali.
This mistake was first picked up by a Dutch internet entrepreneur called Johannes Zuurbier in 2013. He noticed a lot of emails coming in from the American military after purchasing a contract to manage Mali’s country domain.
The emails contain a massive amount of sensitive information that could be used against the US if it falls into the wrong hands. For example, Zuurbier highlighted emails containing private data on military personnel and their families.
One email was even sent by Turkey, addressed to the US, and regarded a possible imminent attack by the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) against Turkish interests in the US.
So far, these emails have been kept safe by Zuurbier, but his warnings to the US over the past 10 years have been completely ignored.
However, here’s the catch: his contract to manage Mali’s domain expired on Monday, and those emails will now head straight into the hands of Mali’s government. And guess who is a close ally of Mali’s? Yep, Russia – and there’s no doubt they’ll be highly interested in snooping around US military emails given half the chance.
Wait, it gets even worse.
The US military isn’t the only one making this mistake. According to the Financial Times, the Dutch army uses the domain “army.nl”, which is just a whisker away from “army.ml”. Dozens of emails intended for them have also wound up in the West African country.
Compiled by Arthur Greene