I'm imagining some state or APT engineers who, having reversed the mess, are then having very fraught discussions about what it could mean and getting the boss to bring in a specialist to figure out what they're missing.
So this is closer to reality than we might want to admit. I once had a terrible business idea that we laughed at internally and mentioned it to someone in the industry, who then promptly 'ripped it off'. Our 'secret' was not a great new product, it was actually a ridiculous concept.