Air Force e-mails go to wrong address

The U.S. Air Force accidentally sent e-mails that were meant to go to its base in Mildenhall, England, to a tourism Web site with a similar address.

Gary Sinnott had created a Web site, Mildenhall.com, in the 1990s to promote his hometown. But not long after that, he reportedly began to be bombarded with e-mails from Air Force members who were trying to contact people on the base, according to the BBC.

Sinnott contacted Air Force officials, who told him not to be concerned about it and assured him they would tell their staff to use the correct address. But what started off as some personal e-mails and jokes later devolved into some pretty classified information, including military procedures.

At one point, Sinnott received information about a presidential flight, so he contacted the Air Force again and an official, as expected, "went nuts," he told the BBC.

Sinnot has since closed down the Web site to avoid receiving any more of the e-mails.

[patkohler]

great....

so now someone can buy that domain and start getting classified information. good work USofA

[bigminisachin1231]

More info, please...

So why couldn't he post the emails up? I mean, if they're sent to him, legally, he can put them on the web, right?

[TBolt]

lawsuit

He'd probably get sued to say the least. I'm sure the argument against him would've been something along the lines of "the material was official military business intended for another party." And, he never "legally" received the e-mails. He accidentally received the e-mails.

[n3td3v]

Its a well known hacker tactic. "Typosquatting".

Its called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting
Its a well known hacker tactic.

The Air Force got compromised by clever people.

This will not be the last.

[Lee in San Diego]

.mil?

If they send it to @mildenhall.mil, there wouldn't be a problem. It is
kind of like the whitehouse.com site that people would visit
thinking that is the President's, but at one time was porn site.

[paul.saulnier]

Why close the web site?

Instead of closing the whole site, maybe he could have turned off the e-mail access, or bounce all emails except those sent directly to him?

I hope he doesn't try suing for damages now. I doubt the air force was sending any more e-mail than what most of us get for spam.

[Kings X Rocks!]

Agree...

His MX points to a providers email server, so he could just shut down whatever "mechanism" he uses to pull emails down from the provider server. Or, as mentioned by paul...bounce emails not sent to him...so the sender gets an NDN and can have an "oops" moment.

Don't know what that has to do with his website...which is "alive" but won't allow pages to be displayed.

Obviously, the members of the AF need to bone-up on managing the recipient domain name a little better.

[LANMan28]

"Do something amazing..."

To think, the Air Farce is taking up the job of "cyber security" for the US government and military... Why am I NOT reassured?

[gopnick]

Are you nuts?

Why would he intentionally put US servicemen and women in
danger and expose the president to potential threat? Jeez. Some
of you people are nuts.

[gopnick]

oops

This was supposed to be in response to "more info please"...

[Dalkorian]

already done

Gopnick asked:

"Why would he intentionally put US servicemen and women in
danger and expose the president to potential threat?"

I'd argue the AF has already done that. We got lucky that this guy
isn't a "bad guy", otherwise we'd be hosed.

[benjr218]

Pizza.com

Why are you so suprised how valuable pizza.com was if you can see how important a small town's .com is to the US military?