A team of two students at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and one student from the George Washington University School of Law took the top honor in the Policy Competition category of the 13th annual New York University’s Cyber Security Awareness Week in November.
The contest, with a prize pool of $1 million in scholarships, drew 10,000 contestants from more than 100 countries.
George Mason’s Julian Flamant and Katie Morehead, working with GWU student Austin Mooney, won first place—and $1,000—for their solution to real-world computer security challenges with an eye on aligning business incentives with the costs of data protection.
“We sought to create a policy proposal that would allow consumers who, for example, had their reputation tarnished by data breach or their private life exposed to the public by a data breach, to have the ability to recover money for their suffering,” said Flamant, a second-year law student at Scalia Law.
“For example, TrendNet baby monitors were hacked, giving hackers the ability to control the monitors to spy on people in their homes or scream at children in their beds,” said Morehead, a third-year law student.
The proposal would give regulated companies an important reason to secure data better and protect those who are harmed by breaches.