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You can see their emails at the bottom: those are universities/research institutes domains. You can be sure _they_ did not actually spend that themselves.

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I'm just amazed that they were willing to take the risk that there was a bug in the code and they wouldn't find a collision.

It was a sound premise to investigate. EFF spent much more to demonstrate the weakness of DES decades ago, and it highlighted the need for stronger crypto and the fact that nation states would be more than able to break commonly-used crypto at the time.

This is cheap!

Breaking MD5 for the Flame malware probably set the NSA back millions when you sum the person-hours and CPU time together.

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