Researchers allegedly found security protocols "burdensome."
Dr. Emmanouil "Manos" Antonakakis runs a Georgia Tech
cybersecurity lab and has attracted millions of dollars in the last few years from the US government for Department of Defense research projects like "Rhamnousia: Attributing Cyber Actors Through Tensor Decomposition and Novel Data Acquisition."
The government yesterday sued Georgia Tech in federal court, singling out Antonakakis and claiming that neither he nor Georgia Tech followed basic (and required) security protocols for years, knew they were not in compliance with such protocols, and then submitted invoices for their DoD projects anyway. (Read the
complaint.) The government claims this is fraud:
At bottom, DoD paid for military technology that Defendants stored in an environment that was not secure from unauthorized disclosure, and Defendants failed to even monitor for breaches so that they and DoD could be alerted if information was compromised. What DoD received for its funds was of diminished or no value, not the benefit of its bargain.
