#shorts On 7/18/2023, a reporter asked Biden Top Spox John Kirby, “For over 10 years, millions of emails associated with the US military have been getting sent to Mali, a West African country allied with Russia, due to a typo. Instead of appending the military’s .MIL domain to their recipient’s email address, people frequently type .ML, the country identifier for Mali, by mistake.
Reporter: there’s an FT report that, for the past decade, millions of U.S. military emails containing highly sensitive information have been misdirected to Mali due to a typo with —
MR. KIRBY: Yeah.
Reporter: — dot-ml instead of dot-mil.
MR. KIRBY: Yeah.
Reporter: A Dutch tech entrepreneur who’s been managing the country domain has been warning about this for decades — for the past decade. And control over that domain returns to the Malian government on Monday. They’re a Russian ally.
So what is the administration doing to deal with this issue and prevent our sensitive military data from potentially falling into the hands of a Russian ally? And how was this allowed to go unaddressed for the past decade despite warnings?
MR. KIRBY: I would first point you to our colleagues at the Department of Defense. This is really more for them to speak to. But as I understand it, they have now for quite some time have in place a tool that — that stops e- — outbound emails that don’t have the dot-mil at the end from going. There’s not a — there’s — there’s not a huge amount that they can do for people sending emails into the dot-mil domain from outside.
other clips of this published longer video is here: https://youtu.be/JXQdGmvgB44
Millions of emails to military’s .MIL domain went to .ML domain (Mali is Russian ally) by mistake