U.S. Special Operations Command emails were reportedly leaked online for nearly two weeks, exposing unclassified information, and the Pentagon is currently examining how this may have happened, a Pentagon official has revealed.
U.S. Navy Commander Jessica McNulty, a Pentagon official, told CNN that the Department of Defense's chief information officer and the U.S. military's Cyber Command are looking into the incident's cause and "why this problem was not detected sooner."
An investigation was launched when an outside cybersecurity expert found three gigabytes of unclassified emails from the Department of Defense exposed on the internet on February 8. The emails appeared to have been accidentally posted online owing to a misconfigured server.
Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesperson Ken McGraw told CNN in an email on Tuesday that the military "initiated an investigation into information we were provided about a potential issue with the command's Cloud service" on Monday.
There has been no hacking of U.S. Special Operations Command computer systems, McGraw said, and that's the only other piece of information they have.
The leak, found by independent cybersecurity researcher Anurag Sen, was first reported by TechCrunch.
Sen provided examples of data that went back years and included routine information on U.S. military contracts and requests by Department of Defense employees to have their paperwork processed.
Up until Monday, when the server was secured, Sen claimed, anyone with the IP address could access the material without a password.
This incident demonstrates how even large, well-resourced enterprises can unintentionally expose potentially sensitive internal data due to improper server configuration.
The fact that this is a Department of Defense email server will raise concerns among U.S. officials, but it is not uncommon for huge businesses to accidentally expose internal data to the internet. It is unknown if an unauthorized third party accessed the vulnerable SOCOM information.
The United States Department of Defense's Special Operations Command is the top-secret organization in charge of counterterrorism and hostage rescue operations worldwide.
Cyber Command's participation in the probe reflects the growing importance it has been given in protecting the U.S. military's extensive system of computer networks. Since its inception more than a decade ago, the command has expanded its job to include not only hacking networks belonging to cybercriminals and foreign countries, but also assisting with the security of military computer networks.
