Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to the comments made by a Departmental spokesperson on 27 July 2023, how many emails were sent from his Department to .ML domains in each year since 2010.

The Ministry of Defence takes the security of our people, our information and our systems very seriously. While all sensitive information is shared on systems which would prevent such misdirection, policies are put in place on all email systems to minimise the risk of such mistakes. On OFFICIAL systems, data loss prevention tools will prompt users who seek to send OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE information outside of Government domains, drawing attention to, and allowing the correction of, errors such as mistyped domain names.

Investigations are still ongoing however to date, we have identified 55 emails that have been sent to the .ML top level domain since January 2022. Of these, it is assessed that 15 were misdirected emails, that were destined for a .MIL address. We are confident that this small number of emails did not contain any technical data or information that could compromise operational security. Seven of these were sent in 2022, and eight in 2023.