APA – Bamako (Mali) Bamako has not yet commented on the news surrounding the inadvertent leaking of emails from the United States military to Mali.
For some time now, the news making headlines in Mali has been the leak of millions of emails destined for the US Army.
It has been revealed that a spelling error misdirected sensitive messages from the Pentagon to a company that operates Mali’s Internet domain.
As a result, millions of U.S. military emails were misdirected to Mali.
The emails contained highly sensitive information, including diplomatic cables, tax returns, passwords, and travel details of senior officers.
Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady stream of email traffic continues to flow to the “.ML” domain, the country code for Mali, due to the mistyping of “.MIL,” the suffix for all U.S. military email addresses.
Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch entrepreneur who managed Mali’s national domain until July 17, claims to have discovered the anomaly nearly a decade ago. He claims to be in possession of more than 117,000 misdirected messages, nearly a thousand of which arrived a week ago.
In a letter he sent to the United States in early July, Zuurbier wrote: “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the United States. Some are thinking in particular of Russia, which has become a key ally of the Malian authorities against the backdrop of an ongoing diplomatic row between Paris and Bamako.
But Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary has downplayed the leaks.
According to Ms. Singh, U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) personnel have been adequately trained in this area since an unauthorized e-mail was first disclosed earlier this year. To that end, policies and training mechanisms have been put in place to prevent e-mails from the DOD from being mistakenly sent to other addresses.
Overall, she says, if an e-mail is sent from a DOD address, it will be returned immediately. She gives assurances that “a DOD email address will not be able to send to that email address” and points out that “if an email was sent from a personal Gmail or Yahoo account and ends up in a (.ml) account, all we can do is monitor our DOD data. She added that “ours are intact.”
She clarified that the Pentagon “always discourages people from using their personal email,” insisting that official work must be done on official channels and under official email.
Clearly, then, there is nothing to worry about, she adds.
For now, the Malian government remains silent on the issue.
Even if nothing can be ruled out, some people wonder how it’s possible to send e-mails in the wrong direction more than a thousand times?
Hence the question of whether these e-mails were deliberately sent as part of an “information war”.
MD/ac/lb/as/APA