British Defence Emails End Up in Russian Ally's Hands

Summary:

• British Ministry of Defence (M.O.D) officials mistakenly sent emails meant for the Pentagon to Mali, a Russian ally.
• The error was due to confusion between the domain names 'dot mill' for Pentagon and 'dot ml' for Mali.
• A Dutch internet entrepreneur managing Mali's domain name discovered the misdirected emails.
• Among the emails were sensitive details about British and American personnel working on hypersonic missiles.
• The M.O.D is investigating the extent of potential security breaches.
• With the contract ending, concerns arise about the possible misuse of the misdirected emails.

M.O.D officials have made mistakes and sent emails that were intended to go to the Pentagon to Mali instead. But it also included and revealed the names of British and American personnel working on hypersonic missiles at Port and Down, which you can't really think of as sort of more sensitive area of British military research. That Ministry of Defence officials have been accidentally sending emails meant for the Pentagon. They've been going to an ally of Vladimir Putin. George Grills is defence correspondent at The Times and has uncovered this.

Human Error and Email Confusion

Was it incredibly simple human error that came about basically from a typo in an email? So when you put in the email address for a sort of Pentagon email, the domain name at the end says dot mill, which is only one letter away from the domain name used by Mali, a West African country and Kremlin ally, which uses the domain name dot ml. And basically we have seen evidence that fairly regularly M.O.D officials have made mistakes and sent emails that were intended to go to the Pentagon to Mali instead. In terms of how many may have been delivered or not, because you do have to get the rest of the email address correct as well, I assume, in order for it to actually reach a destination, what do we know about how many we're actually getting through? Well, not quite. I mean, basically it came about because there is a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has been running the contract to manage Mali's domain name. And he set up, he realised he was running it for about 10 years from 2013.

Possible Concerns and Investigation

Yeah, absolutely. And so have we seen I suppose any, any tangible outcome as in any malicious action or cause for concern from Mali or indeed from Russia at the stage, or perhaps that's untreasonable, actually? Well, the M.O.D. is investigating now. I mean, they are maintaining that nothing overly sensitive has been lost. But yeah, I think basically, we can't really tell at the moment.

Contract End and Potential Consequences

Fortunately, we've had this sort of this this Dutchman who is sort of trying to raise the issue and who is now but because he's coming to the end of the contract, he can no longer sort of access these emails for well, basically, since the beginning of this week, when the contract was handed over. So from now on, any emails that have missed are directed to Mali will be, you know, can be freely used by the military leadership in Bamako.