Recovering a Membership Platform After Compromise

1. Project Overview

This was a live membership product with a website, payments, CRM, Telegram access and several historical automations. When I joined, the system showed signs of compromise: legacy PHP code, backdoor behaviour, SEO spam, unclear access boundaries and payment logic that was unsafe to carry into a new release

I was brought in to restore control of the product and relaunch it without carrying the old infected environment forward

2. The Challenge

•separate the live product from historical, potentially compromised infrastructure

•preserve active entitlements without losing members during the transition

•replace the fragile connection between payments, CRM and Telegram access with a verified end-to-end flow

•make plans, registration, renewals, freezes, refunds and manual exceptions explicit

•create recoverable backups and verify restoration before reopening sales

3. Solution and Delivery

Clean environment instead of blind migration

I inventoried domains, servers, databases, integrations and legacy dependencies, created a full backup of files, database and logs, and verified restoration in an isolated environment. The new deployment was built separately; old code, keys and unknown integrations were not carried forward automatically

Controlled website and payment path

The mobile-first website, plan logic, registration form and payment path were rebuilt. Server-side validation now checks the payment signature, merchant, order ID, amount, currency and status, while duplicate callbacks cannot grant access twice

Access as a business entity

A payment no longer triggers a blind chain of disconnected commands. The system connects the contact, entitlement, term, renewal, freeze and actual Telegram ID, checks the entitlement before membership approval and keeps manual exceptions separate from payment records

Anonymised membership pricing and plan selection screen

Verification before reopening sales

I ran 16 test suites covering duplicate callbacks, expired entitlements, unknown profiles, existing members, join requests, manual grants and rejection paths. A real small payment, CRM record and access behaviour were also checked in an isolated test flow

4. Result

•the new website and purchases are live

•70 confirmed historical entitlements were migrated and activated, with service records excluded

•the old membership cron no longer controls access

•payments, CRM and Telegram access now run through a controlled server-side route

•duplicate payments, expired rights and unknown profiles follow separate checks

•external backups of code, database and configuration were created and integrity-checked

5. Technical Outcome

Instead of a system where compromise could only be suspected, the product now has a clean deployment boundary, reproducible access rules, idempotent payment handling, manual review for exceptions and a verified recovery path

This was not just a security fix or a new website. I restored control after an attack, preserved working member entitlements and reopened sales only after the critical paths could be tested and explained