Millions of US military emails have been mistakenly sent to Mali, a Russian ally, because of a minor typing error.
Emails intended for the US military’s “.mil” domain have, for years, been sent to the west African country which ends with the “.ml” suffix.
Some of the emails reportedly contained sensitive information such as passwords, medical records and the itineraries of top officers.
Like what in the fuck how could anyone in charge be this stupid and careless??
For years. Unbelievable.
Minor typos seem pretty believable to me
Me too. There’s a guy who sometimes fat fingers my email address instead of his own, over the years I’ve had a bunch of his receipts and confirmation emails.
It was a single letter, so I’d say it was a small one, but minor? Given the implication I’d say it’s pretty far from minor. It’s a typo that should’ve been preemptively avoided; all it took was the appropriate amount of caution and foresight. That it wasn’t acknowledged as a problem immediately is astounding, but that it continued to happen for years without knowledge is most definitely unbelievable.
From the perspective of user land, it’s a minor error, is what I meant
I presume you’ve never once made a single letter typo?
Making a typo that can send to the wrong place is a common error by anyone. Net security that allows it, presumably some of them from military intranets or in various correspondences without flagging it a problem, that’s a huge mistake. The solution was a patchwork to make the problem a future one, which is so government typical. Probably would have required some reprogramming in COBOL, and they couldn’t find anyone.
Who are you talking about? The ICAAN? (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)?