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The U.S. Department of Defense is apprise tens of one thousand of individuals that their personal entropy was exposed in an email information tumble last year .
accord to the rupture notice letter of the alphabet get off out to impact individuals on February 1 , the Defense Intelligence Agency — the DOD ’s military intelligence operation delegacy — said , “ numerous e-mail substance were unwittingly exposed to the cyberspace by a service supplier , ” between February 3 and February 20 , 2023 .
TechCrunch has learned that the breach disclosure missive relate toan unbarred U.S. government swarm e-mail waiter that was spilling sensible email to the loose internet . The cloud electronic mail host , hosted on Microsoft ’s cloud for government customers , was accessible from the cyberspace without a password , likely due to a misconfiguration .
The DOD is ship breach notification letters to around 20,600 individuals whose selective information was affected .
“ As a matter of practice and operations security , we do not annotate on the condition of our web and systems . The affected server was identified and hit from public access on February 20 , 2023 , and the seller has dissolve the issues that resulted in the picture . DOD continues to occupy with the table service supplier on meliorate cyber event prevention and detection . presentment to affect individual is on-going , ” said DOD spokesperson Cdr . Tim Gorman in an email to TechCrunch .
DefenseScoopfirst reportednews of the breach notification letters .
TechCrunchexclusively reported in February 2023 that the DOD was spilling about three terabytes of internal military email , some of which touch to U.S. Special Operations Command , or SOCOM , which carry out special military operations overseas . Some of the exposed information included sore personnel office information and questionnaire by prospective Union employee seek certificate clearance .
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Anyone with the public IP address of the exposed cloud email server could get at the sensitive but unclassified emails inside using only a World Wide Web web internet browser .
Security researcher Anurag Sen discover the exposed data spill online and asked for TechCrunch ’s helper in report the information exposure to the U.S. administration . TechCrunch report the spillway to SOCOM on February 19 . The cloud email host was stop up on February 20 after TechCrunch escalated the incident to senior U.S. government officials after not try back .
It ’s not clear for what reason the DOD took a class to inquire the incident or send word those affected .
A voice for Microsoft did not reply to a postulation for comment .
Sensitive US military email spill online