Billing Millions To Secretly Pay Up

Here we go again with the grand illusions of incident response, as desperate ransomware victims discovered MonsterCloud was allegedly just paying their extortionists behind their backs. Shielding our estates from such brazen swindles apparently requires verifying decryption partners and keeping pristine backups so we never hire middlemen. Why do we even bother trusting proprietary recovery miracles when consultants simply expense the ransom and pocket a massive markup? Dodging both cyber extortionists and their duplicitous fixers is enough to make any sane engineer throw in the towel.