[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] For want of a nail, the shoe was lost... For ten years, which means it started on President Obama’s watch.- .MIL is the suffix to all US military email addresses, but people typed in .ML
- Latter is country identifier for Mali, which resulted in flow of misdirected emails
One misdirected email included travel plans for General James McConville, the chief of staff of the army.
About ten years ago, a Dutch internet entrepreneur called Johannes Zuurbier first identified this problem.
Zuurbier, who has a contract to manage Mali's country domain, has reportedly also been collecting misdirected emails - nearly 117,00 of them - since January in order to show the government the seriousness of the issue.
He sent a letter to the government earlier this month, saying: 'This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.'
Mali's government - which has close ties to Russia - gains control of the .ML domain and therefore the misdirected emails today after Zuurbier's ten-year management contract ran out.
Zuurbier said he approached several government officials like a defence attache in Mali, a senior adviser to the US national cyber security service as well as some White House officials.
He took over control of the Mali domain in 2013 and quickly noticed many requests for domains like army.ml and navy.ml coming in, which he suspected were for emails.
The system he set up to catch any correspondence like that was soon overwhelmed and stopped collecting messages.
Zuurbier said he got legal advice and repeatedly tried to alert the government - to no avail.
Of the nearly 120,000 emails Zuurbier has collected just in the last few months, none are marked as classified and much of them are just spam mail.
However, some of the misdirected emails contain highly sensitive data on military personnel like General McConville.
The sensitive information shared in these emails include X-rays and other medical data, information from identity documents, crew lists for military vessels as well as staff lists for military bases, tax and financial records, photos of bases, inspection reports, maps of installations, criminal complaints against personnel as well as internal investigations into bullying.
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