I agree. They should take this as a learning opportunity and see what can be done to improve security and detect malicious code being introduced into the project. What's done is done, all that matters is how you proceed from here. Banning all future commits from UMN was the right call. I mean it seems like they're still currently running follow up studies on the topic.

However I'd also like to note that in a real world penetration test on an unwitting and non-consensual company, you also get sent to jail.

Everybody wins! The team get valuable insight on the security of the current system and unethical researchers get punished!