[Infowarrior] - USG forces military secrets on Brit webmaster

[Richard Forno]

The Register » Management » Public Sector »

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/03/mildenhall_website/
US government forces military secrets on Brit webmaster
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Monday 3rd March 2008 20:38 GMT

A website promoting the town of Mildenhall has been shut down after it
unintentionally became the recipient of hundreds of classified emails,
including messages detailing the planned flight path of President Bush.

Over more than a decade, www.mildenhall.com (http://www.mildenhall.com/)
received emails detailing all kinds of secret military information that were
intended for official Air Force personnel. One detailed where Air Force One
could be found in the air during a planned visit to the region by President
Bush. Others included battlefield strategy and passwords.

"I was being sent everything from banal chat and jokes, to videos up to 15mb
in size," Gary Sinnott, owner of mildenhall.com, said in this article
(http://new.edp24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=New
s&tBrand=edponline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED29%20Feb%202008%2017%3A55%3A25%
3A897) in EDP 24. "Some were classified, some were personal. A lot had some
really sensitive information in them."

As owner of mildenhall.com, Sinnott received every email that had that
domain name included in the address field. The site was set up to provide
information about the town of Mildenhall, which is about a half-hour's drive
north east of Cambridge.

Sinnott says he brought the SNAFU to the attention of Air Force officials
but was never able to get the problem fixed. At first, they didn't seem to
take the matter seriously, but eventually, they "went mental," he said.
Officials advised Sinnott to block unrecognizable addresses from his domain
and set up an auto-reply reminding people of the address for the official
air force base.

But still, the official emails continued to flow in to Sinnott's site. And
to make matters worse, some people got angry after Sinnott told them they
were sending email to the wrong address and gave his address to spammers.
Sinnott was receiving 30,000 pieces of email per day, most of which was junk
mail.

So Sinnott pulled the plug on the website. Though he remains the owner of
mildenhall.com, it may only be a matter of time before all those emails
incorrectly addressed to Air Force personnel at mildenhall.com automatically
begin to bounce. And that ought to make security conscious people everywhere
breath a little easier.

Alas, according whois records, mildenhall.net and mildenhall.org are in the
hands of non-military individuals and mildenhall.us is available to anyone
with $35 
(http://www.register.com/product/domain/searchresults.rcmx;jsessionid=4DAE4F
92BD8DE0D9AB0C4F40E728FFC2.euapp04?action=searchresults&formName=box&searchS
tring=mildenhall&selectedTLDs=.com&x=79&y=7). Given what we now know about
the boobs who send confidential information, that ought to give us pause. ®