Double tinfoil hat mode: an attacker learned of my plan to finally update my personal computer out of 20.04 today and is DDoSing canonical so I can't do that and I remain vulnerable to the backdoors they've found.

The plot thickens...

If you can access AF_ALG on a server you don't need to do shenanigans like that. It's much easier to just find another bug and exploit that one instead.

The copy.fail website is very silly, it is not a special bug. If anyone gets compromised by that vuln their node architecture was broken anyway, patching copy.fail doesn't help.

Seems reasonable to assume it's something to do with the recently publicized exploits. More likely, this could be an extortion attempt by criminals rather than a competitor.

s/competitor/intelligence services/

why a competitor? Criminals, secret services, country adversaries...