Case Study / Financial Services / Red Team

Preventative maintenance held the line against an unannounced elite Red Team — zero compromise, zero downtime.

Tier-1 Canadian Financial Institution

100%
malicious requests blocked
0
footholds established
<60 sec
attack pattern detection
The Challenge

What we were called in to solve.

One of Canada’s largest Tier-1 financial institutions runs a high-visibility, public-facing WordPress asset under OSFI B-13 and PCI-DSS scrutiny. To validate real-world readiness, their Enterprise Risk team quietly commissioned one of North America’s most respected offensive security firms to run a covert Red Team adversary simulation — top-tier operators holding OSCP, OSCE, GPEN, and CREST CRT credentials. We were never told it was coming. The Red Team had already fingerprinted the full stack down to plugin, theme, PHP, and library versions before firing the first packet.

The Approach

How OwlEye executed.

  • 01Phase 1 — Reconnaissance: Our WAF and behavioral IDS/IPS flagged the low-and-slow REST API and wp-json enumeration inside the first minute, triggering adaptive rate limits and ASN/IP reputation scoring instead of tipping the attacker off.
  • 02Phase 2 — Exploitation: SQLi, stored/reflected XSS, XML-RPC amplification, credential stuffing, and LFI/RFI payloads were rendered inert at the edge. XML-RPC was already disabled, /wp-admin/ MFA-gated and IP-allowlisted, and every core/plugin/theme was patched current with virtual patches ahead of vendor releases.
  • 03Phase 3 — Evasion: When the Red Team pivoted to obfuscated payloads, rotating residential proxies, and session manipulation, our 24/7 SOC opened active threat hunts — correlating SIEM telemetry, pushing dynamic edge policies, and enriching IOCs from our threat intelligence platform in real time.
  • 04Incident response: NIST 800-61 lifecycle executed end-to-end — detect, triage, contain, eradicate, recover — with transparent telemetry shared with the client's security leadership once the engagement was disclosed.
The Outcome

Quantified, audited, repeatable.

Zero compromise. Zero data exfiltration. Zero downtime. 100% of malicious requests mitigated at the edge, coordinated attack patterns identified in under 60 seconds, and no legitimate user traffic blocked. The testing firm’s formal report acknowledged the defensive posture as the gold standard for managed WordPress security — the result of preventative version control, WordPress hardening, and defense-in-depth done every day, long before the first probe arrived