Compromised admin control panel rebuilt with hardened authentication in under a day.
Credential harvesting let attackers borrow admin scopes. We contained access within minutes, rebuilt the auth stack, and gave leadership full visibility on exposure.
8 hours
Recovery window
3,200
Customers notified
1 incident lead + 2 platform engineers
Team involved
0 post-response
Compromised accounts
What went wrong
Weak auth hygiene and dormant logging left a wide opening. We surfaced the systemic issues rapidly so corrective work could begin without guesswork.
- Legacy OAuth app reused across internal tools provided an MFA bypass path
- Session lifetimes for privileged roles stretched beyond policy
- Audit logging disabled on the control plane meant late detection of credential replay
Recovery timeline
Stakeholders tracked every milestone as scopes were revoked, controls rebuilt, and monitoring rearmed.
00:00
Containment stand-up
Joined engineering leadership in Teams, killed active sessions tied to harvested credentials, and isolated the admin API behind a maintenance gate.
01:40
Auth rebuild
Regenerated OAuth client secrets, enforced step-up MFA for admin routes, and cut over to short-lived signed tokens for the control plane.
04:10
Tenant validation
Ran scripted integrity checks across tenant configs, restored tampered RBAC settings from version control, and confirmed no billing drift.
06:45
Hardening + tabletop
Delivered temporary WAF rules, provisioned SIEM alerts around admin scope changes, and facilitated a credential-abuse tabletop for product and support.
What the client received
Nothing left ambiguous—just documented actions, strategic next steps, and ready-to-run detection content.
Executive brief
One-pager covering root cause, containment timeline, customer impact, and follow-on commitments for board distribution.
Auth resilience roadmap
30-day plan tackling OAuth rotation cadence, device trust, scoped API keys, and automated admin onboarding controls.
Detection pack
Sigma rules and Datadog monitors tied to admin session anomalies, shipped with runbooks for tier-one responders.
Client perspective
"We were bracing for a customer churn event. Instead, we had a crisp brief to share within hours, and engineering shipped stronger auth by the weekend."
Need a similar response?
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