Contain the incident before ordinary repair begins.
We start with the symptoms, timeline, hosting account, domain and DNS, platform, recent changes, available backups, administrator access, security notices, and any evidence from the host or search engines. If the public site is actively harming visitors or exposing data, containment takes priority over cosmetic repair.
Preserving the current files, database, logs, and provider notices can help distinguish a compromise from an update failure or hosting problem. Reinstalling everything immediately may remove useful evidence while leaving the original entry point open for an encore nobody requested.
Identify whether the site was hacked, broken, or both.
Unexpected redirects, spam pages, unfamiliar administrator accounts, injected scripts, browser warnings, and host suspensions can indicate compromise. White screens, fatal errors, database failures, missing assets, broken checkout, and failed forms may instead come from code, configuration, updates, storage, or infrastructure.
We trace the failure across the layers we can access rather than assuming every outage is malware. The recovery plan may involve a clean backup, infected-file removal, credential changes, software repair, database work, DNS correction, hosting coordination, or a focused replacement for an abandoned component.
Restore the business path, then reduce repeat risk.
Recovery is not complete because the homepage loads. We verify the critical customer paths included in the scope, such as navigation, contact forms, booking, account access, checkout, and confirmation emails, then document unresolved risks or vendor actions still required.
When the foundation is recoverable, follow-up work may include supported updates, access cleanup, backups, monitoring, security hardening, or staging. When the site cannot be trusted or safely maintained, we explain the rebuild or migration option without pretending another emergency patch is a long-term strategy.
Emergency recovery can include
- Incident intake, access review, and immediate containment plan
- Backup, file, database, log, and hosting evidence review
- Malware, redirect, configuration, update, and integrity diagnosis
- Clean restoration, focused repair, or hosting coordination
- Critical-path verification and practical recovery recommendations