A former IBM Vice President, William Barlow, has alleged in a recently unsealed lawsuit that IBM and AT&T lacked fundamental security measures and concealed nation-state hacking incidents from the government. He stated that they failed to maintain logs for VPN connections managed by AT&T and did not use network segmentation to prevent unauthorized access by foreign hackers.
Barlow claiming that the inability to detect and recover from breaches led the companies to suppress warnings and evidence of ongoing exploitation. The lawsuit, originally filed in 2020 under the False Claims Act, became public after the federal government opted not to participate as a co-plaintiff.