Got this from ‘various’ mil and R&D sources…
I was in charge of DOD for a day, Georgia Tech would NEVER get a government contract again, and would have to pay back ALL the $$ sent them!!!
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:
Full article, HERE from Ars Technica.
For my ‘sins’ for over a dozen years, I worked with a number of UARCs and FFRDCs (list HERE of DOD S&T organizations) on various R&D programs for the Navy. All of them had stringent security requirements, and they were routinely ‘checked’ by our security folks for compliance.
EVERY organization I worked with was subject to hacking attempts almost daily by Russian/Chinese/Iranian government organs, and HUMINT intrusions by ‘students’…
So the best bet is that anything Georgia Tech was working on was/is compromised and probably has been since day two of it’s existence.
Egos… Gah!!!
Antonakakis was previously best known for his bit part in the Trump Russiagate thing in 2016. It would ironic in the extreme that a man who claimed Russia was communicating illicitly with Trump had computers in his lab actually communicating illicitly with Russia.
(https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/222496/durham-related-emails-prompt-darpa-to-deny-involvement-in-attributing-2016-dnc-hack-to-russia/ )
I would like to see all Federal and Foreign money be removed from all US colleges.
I worked with GTRI on a couple of classified projects many years ago. They were pretty serious then.
This sounds like poor security on sensitive but unclassified systems, since classified systems better be air gapped!
One contractor, and there are many. No wonder so many new Chinese weapons are almost direct copies of those designed for the United States. If they hanged those that intentionally allowed security breaches, many of the problems will go away.
That would require a federal government looking out for the interests of the American people, rather than looking out for Chinese interests, Marxist oligarchs, etc. That isn’t going to happen until the media-academia-government complex is shattered.
Francis- I’d forgotten about that!
JG- ‘Some’ do good work… some…
Jon- We did ONE project with them, had issues with the PhD and grad student’s ‘work ethic’…
Jess- Good point.
TOS- True.
America doesn’t penalize espionage…either deliberate or inadvertent…. severely enough. Accidentally or incompetently allowing classified material to be acquired by our enemies should require a minimum 10 year prison term. Longer if the damage done is very severe . WILLFUL espionage and spying should see the death penalty being mandatory. No choice allowed. The risks from espionage are minimal and the rewards can be significant. That must change.
When these people start going to prison for extended stays in the general population in the more unpleasant institutions, there will be change. Absent that, there’s no reason not to follow Uncle Joe’s 10% for the Big Guy model.
Quite.
You can tell the gov is serious about security – they’ve prosecuted a former President for having classified documents they say he shouldn’t have had…. oh, wait, they elected NOT to prosecute the current President for the same thing…. cue Emily Litella …
Oops.