The Justice Department is showing more intent to hold companies that do business with federal agencies accountable for not disclosing data breaches and following cybersecurity standards to prevent them.

How does Justice plan to do that? Via existing authorities under the False Claims Act that imposes financial liability on businesses and people found to have defrauded governmental programs.

So what should contractors take heed of and act on? This episode of Project 38 aims to answer that question with the help of Susan Cassidy and Ashden Fein: partners at the law firm Covington who specialize in government contracting, cyber and national security.

As Cassidy and Fein tell our Ross Wilkers, what companies that work with the government should do today is more of a fine-tuning internal processes than developing new ones. But DOJ’s comments on what it plans to do are putting industry on notice given all the various cyber breaches of federal networks and critical infrastructure, and when considering the U.S. government is the largest collector of data anywhere.