And to further your point, firing a bunch of probationary employees, who very well might be part of that younger demographic, isn't going to help.
I absolutely have people in my office that shouldn't be in the work force. When someone comes up to me and tells me their monitor hasn't worked in 5 days, and they've had to use another desk, and then I go over there and turn the fucking computer on...we have a problem. There's no ROI there; it's simply a sunk cost.
Another thing to point out is the discovery of sloppily protected sensitive information. They are simply out of their depth in this world and when they stumble upon something they shouldn't have, they aren't going to know any better. This is not the way to assess all that public information that people continually talk about assessing, but never do. I'd bet my last dollar that the compilation of data from this social experiment is going to be a case study.
A general comment I want to make about networks that have been discovered via Shodan, there's a reason why RMF is a thing. Even though it is a thing, doesn't mean that every organization does it well. People should be more worried about the power going out at the grocery store than Russia wanting to conquer Europe. One could happen tomorrow, the other not in my lifetime. Based on Google AI results, the USA graduates 10k-25k cyber professionals every year to China's 185k. Statistically speaking, we aren't even competing. We shouldn't be pushing to "return money to the taxpayers," we should be pushing new initiatives to compete in the cyber domain.
Pick.
Your.
Poisson.
Nuclear warfare is not going to be our downfall.