Case study

Fintech landing stack cleaned, performance tuned, and campaign trust restored in one day.

SEO poisoning hijacked paid traffic. We removed malicious scripts, accelerated load times, and armed marketing with a resilient deployment model.

Same day

Recovery window

12 active funnels

Campaigns restored

1 incident strategist + 2 performance engineers

Team involved

35% faster pages

Performance gain

What went wrong

Loose marketing governance and flat deployment controls made it easy for attackers to hijack funnels. We put the gaps in plain view.

  • Malicious redirects injected via compromised tag manager container
  • CI/CD pipeline allowed direct production pushes without review
  • Legacy caching rules masked defacement and slowed detection

Recovery timeline

Every milestone focused on restoring trust with paid media while shipping lasting controls.

00:00

Campaign triage

Coordinated with paid media teams, disabled poisoned redirects, and rerouted high-value traffic to hardened landing pages.

02:10

Malware eradication

Purged injected scripts, rebuilt static assets from git, and rotated API keys for analytics and tag platforms.

04:40

Performance uplift

Refactored image delivery, optimised edge caching, and eliminated render-blocking scripts to claw back SEM quality scores.

07:00

Hardening rollout

Implemented approvals in CI/CD, enforced branch protections, and shipped monitoring for campaign integrity signals.

What the client received

Marketing left with proof of fix, faster pages, and a deployment model they could defend.

Marketing incident brief

Incident summary and ROI impact update tailored for growth and compliance leaders.

CI/CD reinforcement plan

Roadmap for guarded deployments, preview environments, and automated performance gates.

Integrity monitoring pack

Synthetic checks, webhook alerts, and tag governance rules to keep campaigns trustworthy.

Client perspective

"Campaign spend was haemorrhaging. The Hack Doctor crew halted the bleed, sped up our stack, and gave marketing bulletproof talking points the same day."

Growth Director, Fintech Scale-up

Need a similar response?

If malicious redirects are eating your ad spend, we can stabilise and harden the stack quickly.