Bill Buchanan - When A Typo Matters … Sending Sensitive Military Information to Mali

I receive a good deal of incorrect emails on my Gmail account. Most of it relates to the gathering of war veterans in the US or church events in Illinois that I must attend. Why? Because someone, somewhere, has a similar email address to me. Perhaps it is Bill Buchan or Will Buchanan? Who knows, but I get them constantly, and where I discretely decline the invite and ask them to check the email address.

Overall, I never embarrass those who send me these emails by responding back to the whole group. Many times, there can be over 50 people that are copied into the email. It is all part of the silly world of email. But, when incorrect emails go to places with sensitive data, we must worry.

And, so, the Financial Times [here] has now disclosed that a typo in the definition of an email address has sent 100s of thousands of emails from its military domain (.MIL) to the Mali domain (.ML).

This includes sensitive documents, tax returns, travel information and password resets. It is thought that this has existed for over a decade and was discovered by Johannes Zuurbier (and who is in contact with those who managed the .ML domain), but only now is it being taken seriously by the US military. For this, he found over 117,000 misdirected email messages, which increases by over 1,000 messages by the day.

Postscript

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