UK Defense Ministry Sent Emails Intended For Pentagon To Mali By Mistake - Reports

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 28th July, 2023) UK Defense Ministry employees were accidentally sending emails with classified information to Mali instead of the Pentagon because of a typing error, The Times newspaper reported on Friday, citing officials.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that over the past decade, millions of US military emails intended for the Pentagon were wrongly sent to electronic addresses located in Mali. The error happened due to typos made when entering Mali's ".ML" web domain instead of the US Department of Defense's ".MIL".

British military officials made the same mistake - they also used the ".ml" domain for emails intended for their counterparts in the United States, according to The Times.

The newspaper reported that most of the emails wrongfully sent by the UK officials to the African nation were not important and contained trivial information such as vacation dates of defense ministry employees, but some of them included details about hypersonic missiles research conducted at the Porton Down defense technology center in southwestern England.

The UK Defense Ministry launched an investigation into the matter, however, it said that the scale of the issue is not as significant as in the United States.

"We have opened an investigation after a small number of emails were mistakenly forwarded to an incorrect email domain. We are confident they did not contain any information that could compromise operational security or technical data," a ministry spokesman said, as quoted by The Times.

Parliamentary Defense Under-Secretary Andrew Murrison said that the ministry would consider what, if any, policies must be adapted after a thorough consideration of its email traffic.

The newspaper also expressed concern that Russia might get access to British emails with sensitive information thanks to its close ties with Mali.