The U.S. spent $2.2 million on a cybersecurity system that wasn’t implemented — and might have stopped a major hack

The software company SolarWinds unwittingly allowed hackers’ code into thousands of federal computers. A cybersecurity system called in-toto, which the government paid to develop but never required, might have protected against this.


Justin Cappos (computer science and engineering) is quoted in this article explaining to Pro Publica that in-toto, the system for securing software updates that he and his team have worked on for years, could have prevented a massive hack had it been implemented appropriately.

However, Cappos goes on to explain that the federal government made no attempts to implement the software, which resulted in a massive blow to SolarWinds.