Military Investigating Pentagon Email Leak

The military's Special Operations Command said Tuesday it's probing a slate of unclassified emails that were leaked onto the internet beginning two weeks ago.

According to TechCrunch, the exposed server was hosted through Microsoft's Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers and contained emails about SOCOM and its special military operations.

SOCOM is an elite command for the Department of Defense responsible for counterterrorism and hostage rescue missions around the globe, its website says.

Ken McGraw, a spokesman for SOCOM, told CNN that the command has "initiated an investigation into information we were provided about a potential issue with the command's Cloud service."

"The only other information we can confirm at this point is no one has hacked U.S. Special Operations Command's information systems," McGraw added.

The investigation comes after security researcher Anurag Sen found the exposed server over the weekend and notified TechCrunch, who informed the Pentagon. The server has reportedly been secured since Monday.

Sen said although it was primarily public information about U.S. military contracts, anyone who knew the server's internet protocol address could access the data without a password until the recent fix.

The mailbox server was first detected as spilling data on Feb. 8, and it is still unclear how it was exposed on the internet. However, TechCrunch editor Zack Whittaker suggested it was "likely due to a misconfiguration caused by human error."

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