Have you ever made a typo in a work email and panicked? Well, this one’s way worse. Over the past decade, the US military has accidentally sent over 100,000 e-mails to a Dutch businessman — all due to a typo.
At first, Joost Zuurbier was surprised to regularly find hundreds of e-mails from the United States (US) military sitting in his inbox. Over time, he got used to the mistake.
So, what went wrong here? 👀
An accidental security breach
According to The Financial Times, Zuurbier has been collecting the misdirected emails since January, to persuade the US to take this problem seriously.
Today, Zuurbier counts around 117,000 of them — almost 1,000 of which arrived last Wednesday alone.
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As you can imagine, there was a decent amount of sensitive information in the thousands of e-mails. You know, casual passport numbers, passwords, details about weapon production, you name it. … Oeps.
But.. how does that even happen?!
It turns out, the US military might not be the quadruple-locked, super secure, and exceptionally secret system that we think it is. All it took was a typo.
You can't imagine how many times I check if everything is alright before I click send !!
— Ahmed Abdi (@ahmededos9) July 11, 2023
it's not even a double-check anymore :))
The unlucky Dutch recipient of the classified e-mails was, until recently, the manager of the Malian domain for websites, which is ‘.ml’ — extremely similar to the US military domain ‘.mil’.
As it turns out, people have been accidentally forgetting the crucial ‘i’, causing classified e-mails to be sent straight to Zuurbier’s inbox, instead of the US military.
10 years’ worth of sensitive information
Zuurbier has said that it’s not the first time this has happened. Rather, there’s been a steady flow of typo-sent emails reaching his inbox for the past ten years.
He’s contacted the US government multiple times, informing them of the security breach that could easily be taken advantage of.
Their reaction? Well, there wasn’t much of a response. Apparently, they’ve shrugged off the warnings with little to no action.
Good: The Dutch guy who maintains .ml stops the typo'd emails
— Brad Huber ⚜️👽🍻🕹 (@daybreaker) July 17, 2023
Bad: The govt has warned people about this for a decade and highly sensitive intel still gets accidentally mailed to .ml
Worse: Dutch guy's contract ends today and Mali is taking over, and they are pals with Russia https://t.co/gBdGplpi9v
And now, Zuurbier’s ownership of the Malian domain ended yesterday. This means that it’s back in the hands of the Mali government, a country with strong ties to Russia…
US military, it might be time to stop sitting back and um… do something.
What’s the most embarrassing typo you’ve made? Tell us in the comments below!