Ransomware staging dismantled before encryption at a high-volume marketplace.
Early telemetry saved the day. We coordinated fast containment, restored clean services, and handed leadership a hardening plan they could act on immediately.
8 hours
Recovery window
180k
Listings protected
1 incident commander + 2 SREs + 1 DBA
Team involved
0
Data loss
What went wrong
CI/CD gaps and permissive IAM let attackers stage ransomware. We mapped each weakness to explicit remediation owners.
- An exposed Jenkins worker leaked staging credentials into a public bucket
- Database replicas without encryption-at-rest enabled rapid ransomware staging
- Privilege proliferation in IAM roles made lateral movement trivial
Recovery timeline
Leadership tracked per-hour updates as we contained the threat, validated data, and shipped hardening.
00:00
Signal triage
Opened the incident channel, revoked compromised IAM keys, and paused marketplace order ingestion to protect buyers and sellers.
01:20
Ransomware containment
Quarantined infected ECS tasks, flushed pending encryption jobs, and restored core microservices from immutable backups.
03:50
Integrity validation
Reconciled order and payout ledgers, verified S3 artefacts, and confirmed no unauthorized withdrawals with payment partners.
06:30
Hardening deployment
Rolled infrastructure-as-code updates for least-privilege IAM, enforced signed artefacts in CI/CD, and refreshed SOC playbooks.
What the client received
Deliverables stayed focused on resilience: clear communication, upgraded controls, and continued practice.
CISO board pack
Attack chain, business impact, and recovery KPIs assembled for board review within 12 hours.
CI/CD overhaul plan
Prioritised backlog covering credential hygiene, artefact signing, and gated deployments with owners assigned.
Resilience tabletop kit
Quarterly exercise script, scoring rubric, and response checklist to keep the marketplace team rehearsed.
Client perspective
"We stared at a ransom clock, expecting downtime. Instead we had restored services, stronger controls, and a board-ready brief before lunch."
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