The problem
The site had been compromised: home page defaced, systematic 301 redirect to a scam domain (causing total loss of organic traffic), and 200+ backdoors installed on the server as a persistence mechanism. The portal was effectively offline and the exposed domain was burning through SEO reputation accumulated over years.
The approach
- Forensic analysis to identify entry point, blast radius, and compromise timeline before touching production.
- Containment: malicious traffic to the scam domain blocked, compromised server isolated, filesystem snapshot taken as evidence.
- Eradication: systematic identification and removal of all 200+ backdoors (file system, cron jobs, processes, service configurations, tampered WordPress plugins, shadow database accounts).
- Recovery: 301 redirect removed, original content restored from a verified backup, web server configuration hardened.
- Documented post-mortem and preventive measures applied: security headers, Docker hardening, secret management, Traefik reverse proxy with CrowdSec, baseline monitoring.
The result
- 200+ backdoors removed: file system, cron jobs, processes, and service configurations cleaned up in a verifiable way.
- Malicious 301 redirect neutralized: organic traffic returned to the original content within days.
- Permanent SEO penalties avoided: domain reputation recovered without forced rewrites.
- Hardened configuration: the post-recovery site runs behind a Traefik reverse proxy with CrowdSec, with security headers tuned to prevent the same class of compromise.
The incident closed with a structured post-mortem and a hardening plan that replaced the fragile pre-attack configuration with a repeatable baseline.