3M monthly pageviews, crypto-phishing on every post, pharma spam in Google — back online at 4h 12m
A Chennai news publisher woke on a Monday to find every post on their WordPress site redirecting visitors to a crypto-phishing page. Visitors who didn't land on the phishing page saw Russian pharma spam in their Google search results. The site was doing 3M pageviews a month — every hour of downtime was costing them thousands in ad revenue.
When they called us, we had emergency access within 20 minutes. Within 90 minutes we'd identified the entry point (a WooCommerce addon running a 14-month-old vulnerable version), isolated the infection, and confirmed the scope: 800+ injected PHP files and around 12,000 spam database rows.
We cleaned the malicious code, restored from our backup of pre-compromise files (they'd been on our care plan for 18 months, so we had clean snapshots), patched the plugin, and hardened the stack with Cloudflare WAF, file integrity monitoring, and 2FA for all admin accounts. Site was back online at 4 hours 12 minutes, including a full post-clean QA sweep.