Millions of letters from the American army due to a typo in the domain suffix have been redirected to the government of Mali for years and may end up with the Russian authorities

The Financial Times told the story that on the Internet, even a single letter canBecause of the

Typos in the domain suffix Millions of letters from the U.S. Army are being forwarded to the government of an African country that has ties to Russia.

What is known

All US military email addresseshave the .mil domain suffix, while the .ml domain is the country identifier for Mali. Due to a typo, millions of letters from the American army were forwarded to the Malian government. This was told by Johannes Zuurbier, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands, who managed the African state domain until July 17, according to a 10-year contract.

He tried to contact American officialsfaces to talk about the problem. Earlier this month, Johannes Zurbier, managing director of Mali Dili, wrote that there was a real risk that US adversaries could take advantage of the situation. In particular, we are talking about the Russian Federation, which has close ties with the Malian government.


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The US Department of Defense stated that itaware of the problem. At the same time, representatives of the Pentagon note that none of the letters mistakenly forwarded to the government of Mali was secret. Most of them are spam. However, some emails may contain sensitive information:

  • ship crew lists;
  • medical pictures;
  • identity documents;
  • maps of military facilities;
  • photographs of military bases;
  • tax reports;
  • staff complaints;
  • contracts;
  • travel itineraries for officials.

It is worth noting that emails from the .mil to addresses in Mali are permanently blocked before they can even leave the .mil domain, and the sender of the email is required to verify the recipients' e-mails. This was told by the representative of the US Department of Defense Tim Gorman (Tim Gorman).

A similar problem was found in the armythe Netherlands, which uses the .nl domain because on the keyboard, the letters “n” and “m” are located side by side. In addition, it is noted that the government of Mali received from Australia almost a dozen letters that were intended for the American side and contained information about corrosion on the fifth generation F-35A Lighting II fighters.