Well it’s a good lesson and definitely don’t pay them. but I’m still not sure how they accessed the DB. Did you expose port 3306 over a public IP? Small things

Well it’s a good lesson and definitely don’t pay them. but I’m still not sure how they accessed the DB. Did you expose port 3306 over a public IP? Small things like this are one of the reasons I founded the PHP hosting platform, Amezmo where secure production ready container instances can be launched in seconds.