It's a well written article worth reading in full

In the government's telling, the school routinely missed compliance obligations in large part because the researchers found dealing with security protocols "burdensome." And when the researchers complained, admins gave in.

This is a good motivator, security is important, and there will always be a spectrum between convenience and security, and it's easy to drift too far down to the dangerously convenient side of the spectrum.

This Georgia Tech lab got dangerously convenient security policies, lied about it, got ratted out, and now is the government's displayed example.

Now it's either getting pwned or getting sued, instead of just risking the former. Hopefully this will motivate more people to take security more seriously, especially when hosting sensitive data, and especially when accepting federal government money.

By suing a major institution like Georgia Tech, the US government seems to be firing a shot across the bow of all the other schools running labs with federal security money.

That's the big takeaway from the article. The vast majority of organizations, whether federally funded like this, or something like a private company under finance regulation, barely maintains compliance with regulation, if they even make a real effort at all. This is in the same category as Boeing self-certifying for work that was never done.

Is this something new that's been happening? Have people really lost their minds in recent years, because of COVID or microplastics or political/media mental effects or something? Or are we just becoming more aware of it?

Most AV software is pretty useless and practically malware by itself.

I agree with Dr. Antonakakis that endpoint AV is more trouble than it's worth. I haven't had AV on my computer since I was running WinXP. (I let Windows Defender run, though it has an annoying bug where 7zip executables are flagged)

My strategy is only valid because I'm the only user of my machine. I'd certainly install that stuff on any computer that I shared with someone else.