Not really news?
I believe this sort of thing has been going on for years.
I don't want to go into too much detail in case I start getting visits from well-suited men, but my mother told me a tale from probably a decade back that a son of a former colleague of hers was a few years ahead of me in University doing a software and microelectronics degree of some sort. The lad apparently stumbled upon a way to create a repeatable power failure in hardware. He posted on a few forums on-line asking for peer review, and within a few days all his posts vanished from the forums he posted to, and he had a visit from well-dressed men. His research and equipment was confiscated, but my mother told me he was then funded for a masters and went on to 'work for the government'.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
