It seems like one of those stories created to amuse readers on vacation, and this goal will probably be easily achieved.
Too bad that for a mistake as small as it is serious and sensational, the British army risked a lot. And here we could open a complex question on human fallibility (now that artificial intelligence is increasingly rampant) in performing simple mechanical acts, such as typing an email address.
Right, a wrong recipient when the summons for Wednesday soccer are issued is lightness of little importance. Sending several emails to Mali (a country which is also an ally of Russia) when the real recipient was the Pentagon is a much more serious error.
But what happened?
British Army mistakenly sends emails to Mali
The British Army’s mistake
An official of the British Ministry of Defense had the task of sending some emails to the Pentagon, where his US counterparts operate. Which ended up in Mali.
Yes, you read that correctly. And the error is the same for which, to all of us, it periodically happens that, as they say, an email comes back to us, we rack our brains to understand what problem the server could possibly be, until we have the intuition to read again with Pay attention to the recipient’s address. And we promptly find a typo, or a .com inserted instead of a .it.
Emails sent to Mali instead of the US
It will seem incredible, but a similar error risked creating a diplomatic incident.
Here we must first briefly talk about domain extensions (.it, .com, etc.). The top level domains are the first level extensions, which are divided into generic top level domain e country code top level domain.
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The former indicate a general top-level domain, without territorial references (such as .com, which in theory should be used for commercial sites), the latter refer to a specific territory (.it, for example, is associated with our Village).
And here it is, the military responsible for sending some communications with top secret attachments, should have entered the .mil extension, an abbreviation of military. But due to an oversight he forgot the letter i and typed .ml, sending those delicate emails to the Malian government.
Diplomatic incident averted
Someone noticed the mistake and stopped the flow, even though many emails had already been sent to Mali.
But what did the communications contain? A spokesman for the British Defense said that yes they were confidential messages, but that they did not report “information that could compromise operational safety or technical data”.
The Ministry of Defense itself has announced that an investigation has already been opened to understand how it was possible to commit such a trivial but serious mistake, and why this does not happen again in the future.
Mali ally of Russia
Fortunately, the emails sent to Mali by mistake did not contain information compromising national defense.
Why the African country is a close ally of Russia. Recently, President Putin guaranteed six African states, including Mali, free shipments of grain, after withdrawing from the agreement on the movement of goods on the Black Sea with Ukraine.
Furthermore, mercenaries of the Wagner group operate in Mali, engaged in fighting with the regular army against some local jihadist groups.
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Washington’s previous mistake
A similar mistake had already been made at the beginning of July by the American Defense, which by mistake had sent a large amount of emails to Mali.
According to analysts, moreover, the content transmitted to Africa from Washington was more compromising than that of London.
Ma what is even more absurd is that the error has been repeating itself for ten years. And Mali has received millions of messages actually destined elsewhere. Some of which contained sensitive data such as passwords, medical information and itineraries of senior officers, even images of US military bases.
The beauty (so to speak) is that the manager of the .ml domain on behalf of Mali had devised a system to detect emails received by mistake. But due to the large amount of communications received, the system stopped working. From the month of January alone, there would have been about 117,000 emails arriving in the Mali inbox by mistake.
You’ll probably just need to be more careful. Or take a step back and make way for artificial intelligence?