“They generously offered to give us a “solution file” if we sent them $5,000 in Bitcoin.”
A startup with no on-call rotation got flooded at 3 a.m. from IPs all over the world, then got a ransom email claiming an Apache bug on a site that didn’t run Apache. One AWS WAF rule blocking foreign traffic ended it. The extortionist’s whole business was a botnet and a lie. The real incident response plan was a cat.