the Financial Times<\/a> that he tried to warn the Pentagon multiple times about the problem, in which email traffic meant for the .MIL domain \u2014 which ends all U.S. military email addresses \u2014 instead goes to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Hill has reached out to Zuurbier, but he did not immediately respond to a request for more information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Asked about the mix-up Monday, Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the Defense Department is \u201caware of these unauthorized disclosures of controlled national security information.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She stressed that \u201cnone of the leaked emails that were reported came from a [Department of Defense] DOD email address\u201d and instead came from employees\u2019 personal accounts, such as those from Gmail and Yahoo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe always discourage people from using their personal emails. Official work should be done on official channels and under official emails,\u201d Singh said. \u201cThat\u2019s something that we\u2019ve always emphasized.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She added that after the leak of hundreds of classified and top-secret documents on the video gamer website Discord earlier this year,\u00a0the Pentagon \u201cimplemented policy and training mechanisms\u201d on the DOD systems. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As part of that, if an individual mistakenly sends a message from an .MIL email address to an .ML email address, \u201cit will bounce back. So a DOD email address will not be able to send to that email address,\u201d she noted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, emails meant for Pentagon employees continue to flow to Mali\u2019s domain, according to Zuurbier. He told the Times he has been collecting misdirected emails since January to warn U.S. officials of the issue, and earlier this month sent a letter cautioning: \u201cThis risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said he has around 117,000 misdirected messages, including nearly 1,000 that arrived July 12.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The situation is made more urgent Monday as Zuurbier was set to lose control of the .ML domain, which was due to revert to Mali\u2019s government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Western Africa nation is an ally with Russia and will now be able to collect the mistakenly sent emails. The country did not respond to the Times\u2019s requests for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While most of the emails are spam, some hold information on current U.S. military personnel, contractors and their families, according to Zuurbier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Millions of emails meant for U.S. military personnel were inadvertently sent to email accounts in Mali over the past 10 years due to typos caused by how similar Pentagon email addresses are to the domain for the African country, according to multiple reports. The misdirected emails included\u00a0sensitive information such as diplomatic documents, medical data, maps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":15623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[3131,8813,9879,2997],"class_list":["post-15622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-capitol-hill","tag-email","tag-medical-data","tag-u-s-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15622"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15624,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15622\/revisions\/15624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}