Dr. Emmanouil “Manos” Antonakakis runs a Georgia Tech cybersecurity laboratory and has actually brought in countless dollars in the last couple of years from the United States federal government for Department of Defense research study jobs like “Rhamnousia: Attributing Cyber Actors Through Tensor Decomposition and Novel Data Acquisition.”

The federal government the other day took legal action against Georgia Tech in federal court, singling out Antonakakis and declaring that neither he nor Georgia Tech followed fundamental (and needed) security procedures for several years, understood they were not in compliance with such procedures, and after that sent billings for their DoD tasks anyhow. (Read the grievance.) The federal government declares this is scams:

At bottom, DoD spent for military innovation that Defendants kept in an environment that was not protect from unapproved disclosure, and Defendants stopped working to even keep track of for breaches so that they and DoD might be informed if details was jeopardized. What DoD got for its funds was of reduced or no worth, not the advantage of its deal.

AV hate

Offered the nature of his work for DoD, Antonakakis and his laboratory are needed to comply with lots of sets of security guidelines, consisting of those detailed in NIST Special Publication 800– 171, “Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Information Systems and Organizations.”

Among the guidelines states that makers keeping or accessing such “regulated unclassified info” require to have endpoint anti-viruses software application set up. According to the United States federal government, Antonakakis truly, actually does not like putting AV detection software application on his laboratory’s devices.

Georgia Tech admins asked him to abide by the requirement, however according to an internal 2019 e-mail, Antonakakis “wasn’t responsive to such a recommendation.” In a follow-up e-mail, Antonakakis himself stated that “endpoint [antivirus] representative is a nonstarter.”

According to the federal government, “Other than Dr. Antonakakis’s opposition, there was absolutely nothing avoiding the laboratory from running anti-virus security. Dr. Antonakakis merely did not wish to run it.”

The IT director for Antonakakis’ laboratory was permitted to utilize other “mitigating steps” rather, such as depending on the school’s firewall program for extra security. The IT director stated that he believed Georgia Tech ran anti-viruses scans from its network. This “presumption” turned out to be totally incorrect; the school’s network “has actually never ever offered” anti-viruses defense and, even if it had, the laboratory utilized laptop computers that were frequently taken outside the network border.

The school recognized after a long time that the laboratory was not in compliance with the DoD agreement guidelines, so an administrator chose to “suspend invoicing” on the laboratory’s agreements so that the school would not be charged with filing incorrect claims.

According to the federal government, “Within a couple of days of the invoicing for his agreements being suspended, Dr. Antonakakis relented on his years-long opposition to the setup of anti-virus software application in the Astrolavos Lab. Georgia Tech’s basic anti-virus software application was set up throughout the laboratory.”

States the federal government, the school never ever acknowledged that it had actually been out of compliance for some time and that it had actually submitted many billings while noncompliant. In the federal government’s informing, this is scams.