Yahoo Finance The UK has been accidentally sending classified information to Russian-allied Mali because of a one-letter typo in a domain name: report
British officials have been accidentally sending emails containing classified information to Mali.
Officials misspelled the domain name as ".ml" when it should have been ".mil," per The Times.
Millions of US military emails were sent to Mali due to the same error, the FT previously reported.
The US accidentally sent sensitive information to Mali, a Russian-allied country, due to a typing error — and they're not the only ones.
Officials from the UK Ministry of Defence have also been sending emails containing classified information to Mali because of the same mistake, per The Times, which saw five emails from UK email addressess.
According to The Times, officials from the UK Ministry of Defence misspelled the domain name for their US counterparts when trying to contact them. The officials used the domain name ".ml" for Mali when it should have been ".mil" for the US.
"We have opened an investigation after a small number of emails were mistakenly forwarded to an incorrect email domain," a spokesperson from the UK Ministry of Defence told Insider. "We are confident they did not contain any information that could compromise operational security or technical data."
The Times report did not specify over what time period the emails were sent. It's not immediately clear how many emails the UK government sent to Mali.
Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that millions of US military emails had been accidentally sent to Mali. Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch entrepreneur who was contracted to manage Mali's country email domain, told the FT he'd been trying to warn the US for the past decade.
According to the FT, none of these emails were classified, though some contained highly sensitive information on active US military personnel, contractors, and their next of kin.
The Malian government has received significant assistance from Russia, ranging from military support to providing diplomatic backing. The Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization linked to the Kremlin, also conducts operations in Mali.
Representatives from the Malian government did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.
Editor's note: July 28, 2023 — This story has been updated with responses from the UK Ministry of Defence.
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