Case study

Ecommerce checkout hijack recovered and hardened in six hours.

When a high-volume retailer spotted payment redirects to shady processors, our incident team stepped in to stabilise revenue, clean the infection, and leave their stack stronger than before.

6 hours

Recovery window

3 storefronts

Assets cleaned

2 responders + 1 platform engineer

Team involved

0

Reinfections

What went wrong

Multiple weaknesses stacked together to create the perfect storm. We surfaced the root issues early so leadership understood the risk.

  • Outdated plugin introduced file upload vulnerability
  • Stolen API credentials allowed checkout manipulation
  • Lack of deployment controls slowed clean releases

Recovery timeline

Clear, timestamped updates kept stakeholders aligned while our responders executed in parallel.

00:00

Triage & containment

Jumped into Slack with merchant ops, revoked compromised API keys, isolated affected containers, and captured forensic snapshots.

00:45

Malware removal

Diffed core files, removed backdoors, and restored clean theme assets from versioned storage. Rebuilt checkout templates from known-good commits.

02:30

Checkout validation

Instrumented payment flows, confirmed no fraudulent orders, and coordinated with payment gateway to clear chargeback monitoring.

04:30

Hardening & monitoring

Deployed Cloudflare WAF rules, enabled ImunifyAV, enforced MFA for admin accounts, and set up deployment pipeline with approval gates.

What the client received

We leave every recovery with artefacts your teams can run with—no mystery fixes, no hidden knowledge.

Incident deck

Timeline, impact summary, and risk assessment delivered to executive team within the first hour.

Remediation log

Line-by-line record of file changes, config updates, and API rotations ready for compliance review.

Hardening roadmap

30-day plan with owners for patch cadence, CI/CD enforcement, and ongoing monitoring instrumentation.

Client perspective

"The Hack Doctor team had revenue flowing again in hours. Their documentation meant we could brief leadership and the board without scrambling."

Acting CTO, Global Retailer

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