The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has confirmed an investigation regarding a report that said officials missent emails that were meant for the Pentagon to Mali because of a typo.
But the department disputed the claim that the emails contained classified information.
The report said The Times of London has seen five emails that were sent from UK government addresses. It also said that while most of the emails contained trivial information, some contained “classified” information.
The MoD disputed that claim.
“We assess fewer than 20 routine emails were sent to an incorrect domain [and] are confident there was no breach of operational security or disclosure of technical data.
US Typo Leak
The typo problem was initially reported last week in the Financial Times, which said millions of emails have been missent to Mali in the so-called typo leak.According to the report, Johannes Zuurbier, managing director of the Dutch company Mali Dili, which has a management contract with the Malian government, has nearly 117,000 such emails.
It also said Zuurbier had been trying to warn U.S. authorities for years.
According to the report, Zuurbier’s contract was about to expire, and the .ml domain would return under Malian government control.
Mike Rogers, former commander at the U.S. Cyber Command and former director of the U.S. National Security Agency, told the publication that intelligence can be generated “from unclassified information” when there’s a huge amount of it.
“This is not uncommon,” he said. “It’s not out of the norm that people make mistakes but the question is the scale, the duration, and the sensitivity of the information.”
In an email to The Epoch Times, a spokesman for The U.S. Department of Defence (DoD) said the Pentagon “takes all disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously.”
He said the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has begun blocking DoD emails addressed to .ml lookalike domains.
“By [the start of] 2023, DISA was blocking outbound emails to 135 .ml domains and subdomains.
“In July 2023, DISA began blocking outbound email to the entire .ml domain with the ability to allow legitimate emails.”
Previous UK Leaks
This is not the first time that the UK government examined a data breach that resulted from human error.The documents contained information such as the likely reaction of the Russians to the passage of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender through waters off the coast of Crimea and to the UK military presence in Afghanistan.
After the investigation, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the official had reported the mistake a week before the BBC report, and that the papers had not been compromised.
Two other breaches, both related to the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan, occured in the same year.
During the evacuation of British nationals and some Afghans, Foreign Office staff left documents identifying some Afghans who worked for British authorities on the ground in the abandoned British Embassy compound in Kabul. The document was later found by a journalist from The Times of London.
