Website hacked? Emergency support for your shop

Emergency support that is only built in the moment of crisis is too slow. That is why we create an individual disaster recovery plan for all shops under a managed service contract. This plan defines recovery procedures for various outage scenarios, establishes Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and documents all necessary access credentials, contacts and decision authorities.

The disaster recovery plan is regularly tested and updated. With every change to the infrastructure or deployed systems, we update the plan. Because a recovery plan that does not reflect the current state of the system is useless in an emergency. Regular recovery tests ensure that the documented procedures actually work and that the defined timeframes can be met.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aim to overwhelm your shop with massive numbers of requests and thereby make it unreachable. During a DDoS attack, we work closely with your hosting provider to identify and filter attack traffic. Countermeasures include activating rate limiting, configuring GeoIP filtering, routing traffic through a DDoS protection service and temporarily adjusting server configuration to defend against the attack patterns.

Beyond targeted DDoS attacks, organic load peaks can also crash a shop, for example when marketing success or a viral recommendation generates unexpectedly high traffic. In these cases, we help scale the infrastructure at short notice: temporary capacity expansion, activation of additional caching layers and optimization of server configuration for high-load operation. Our goal is to keep the shop reachable even under extreme load conditions and convert the traffic surge into revenue rather than downtime.

In an emergency situation, clear communication is just as important as technical competence. You need to know at all times what is happening, what measures are being taken and when normal operations are expected to be restored. Our communication protocol provides regular status updates: at least every 30 minutes for critical incidents, with every significant status change and after completion of each measure. You learn immediately when the cause is identified, which resolution path is being taken and what impact on ongoing operations is expected.

Beyond this, we designate a dedicated contact person on our side at the beginning of every emergency deployment who is your primary contact for the duration of the engagement. This contact person coordinates all internal measures and ensures that you receive all relevant information through a single channel. For incidents that involve external parties, such as when coordination with the hosting provider is required, we handle this communication and keep you informed of progress.

An emergency deployment does not end with the restoration of normal operations. Post-incident analysis is an integral part of our process. We document the entire incident, identify the root cause and derive concrete measures to prevent recurrence. For security incidents, this typically includes closing the exploited vulnerability, hardening the system configuration, reviewing all credentials and if necessary introducing additional protective measures such as two-factor authentication or web application firewall rules.

The results of the post-incident analysis feed into ongoing maintenance. If an attack exploited a vulnerability that could also exist in other systems we manage, we proactively check all affected installations. This way, all clients benefit from the findings of individual incidents. This continuous learning loop is one of the reasons why managed systems become increasingly resilient over time.

For Enterprise SLA clients, we offer regular emergency drills in which we simulate an outage scenario and run through recovery procedures under realistic conditions. These drills test not only the technical procedures but also the communication channels, escalation paths and decision processes. Results are documented and feed into improving the disaster recovery plans. Companies that regularly conduct emergency drills handle real incidents faster and with less damage in our experience (project experience), because everyone involved knows what to do.