Global NGO web estate cleaned and standardised across three continents.
Defacements stretched donor trust thin. We orchestrated a globally distributed clean-up, enforced consistent patching, and left regional teams with automation they could depend on.
7 days across regions
Recovery window
14 sites
Properties remediated
3 incident leads + 4 regional engineers
Team involved
0 after hardening
Reinfections
What went wrong
Uneven governance and duplicated credentials widened the attack surface. We surfaced each root issue with remediation owners.
- Outdated CMS plugins across satellite offices created inconsistent patch posture
- Shared admin credentials circulated via email made credential stuffing trivial
- Lack of deployment automation forced manual fixes and drift between regions
Recovery timeline
Regular global syncs kept leadership assured while regional implementation marched forward.
Day 1
Unified triage
Spun up a global war room in Slack, froze DNS where shells were active, and coordinated legal messaging for regional comms teams.
Day 2
Forensic sweep
Ran ImunifyAV across the fleet, removed web shells, restored clean themes from Git, and rotated database credentials in each region.
Day 4
Hardening rollout
Implemented Azure Front Door WAF policies, enforced SSO for admins, and deployed read-only staging with blue/green releases.
Day 7
Training + handover
Delivered playbooks to regional leads, ran live patch drills, and set up monthly governance reviews with the global PMO.
What the client received
Deliverables focused on sustainability—training, governance, and monitoring packaged for regional leads.
Regional remediation log
Site-by-site breakdown of actions, access revocations, and file restores for compliance teams.
Operations handbook
Standardised rollout process covering staging, approvals, and rollback for NGOs with distributed teams.
Monitoring pack
Cloudflare, Azure, and CMS alerting tuned for defacement signals with escalation routes documented.
Client perspective
"Coordinating 14 offices felt impossible until the Hack Doctor leads stepped in. We finished the week with a working playbook and calmer donors."
Need a similar response?
If your organisation spans regions, we can coordinate clean-up and onboarding so every office stays protected.