


Millions of emails sent to Pentagon employees and service members were inadvertently sent to accounts in the African nation of Mali.
Department employees’ email addresses end in “.MIL,” but these emails were unintentionally sent to the “.ML” domain, which corresponds to email accounts in the West African country of Mali.
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The Financial Times first reported on the issue.
Johannes “Joost” Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur, owns a company that has been contracted to manage Mali’s “.ML” domain, and so he has received Pentagon emails for about a decade, he said, including the U.S. Embassy in Mali earlier this year. His company’s contract to manage the domain expired last week.
“We’re aware of these unauthorized disclosures of controlled national security information,” Pentagon deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters on Monday, explaining that someone sending an email from their Pentagon account would not be able to send one to a “.ML” account, it would bounce back.
She indicated that only emails from a personal address accidentally sent to the ".ML" domain would go through, and the department discourages the use of personal emails for work.
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“We can't control how other domains and how other websites send information. So if an email was sent from a personal Gmail or Yahoo account that did likely go through to the .ml account, all we can do is account for our DOD assets and ours remain intact,” she added.
One of the emails sent to the wrong address contained hotel room numbers for the Army chief of staff, Gen. James McConville, and his staff on a trip they took to Indonesia earlier this year.