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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that the Georgia Institute of Technology will settle a whistleblower qui tam suit for $875,000. The case is U.S. ex rel. Craig and Koza v. Georgia Tech Research Corp., Case Number 1:22-cv-02698, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
Two former cybersecurity team members of Georgia Tech's research arm alleged that it had purposely failed to comply with government cybersecurity standards in defense contract work. The suit included allegations that Georgia Tech failed to use proper antivirus software and overinflated numbers in security campus assessments while working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
While the DOJ lauded the settlement as "essential to safeguarding sensitive government information from malicious actors," Georgia Tech denied the allegations in the suit as mischaracterizations. The settlement requires no admission of liability on the part of Georgia Tech and concludes a year-long lawsuit into which the DOJ intervened last year.
The complaint focused on the Astrolavos Lab, which focuses on military cybersecurity projects and has held numerous defense contracts over the last decade. The two original whistleblowers, Craig and Koza, and later, the DOJ, claimed that the Lab had failed to establish a required system cybersecurity plan several years into the contracts and falsified a cybersecurity assessment score submitted to the Department of Defense (DOD) in 2020. According to the DOJ, the two contracts at issue were worth about $31.2 million, which exposed Georgia Tech to more than $90 million in potential treble damages and civil penalties under the False Claims Act.
In October 2024, the defendant filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that its defense contracts were not subject to the security restrictions they allegedly violated. Furthermore, they argued that the DOD didn't stop or attempt to recoup any payments, despite the allegations of noncompliance in the complaint. However, a federal district court judge denied the motion to dismiss after the parties indicated they entered settlement negotiations.
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