Hacked website, catalog in chaos: rescued the data and built a new catalog 2 days after sign-off
A Samara-based supplier of electrical equipment was left without a website. For years, its catalog of 4,649 items had been filled in haphazardly by whoever was available.
What was wrong
PKF VolgaElectroMarket LLC supplies cable tray systems, electrical switchgear and busbar trunking to industrial and construction companies. In August 2026 the company's website was infected with malware, and there was no access to the admin panel. The company wanted a new website with the entire catalog migrated. The hard part was not the page layout. Nobody had managed the catalog systematically: photos were often embedded as links to third-party websites, there was no consistent product card format, and prices had not been updated since 2013-2014. At the same time, the client wanted filters by product parameters, and you can only filter what is structured.
What I did
I restored access to the hosting. I isolated the infected copy of the site in a separate environment and took the data from a database dump rather than from the live site. Four days after the request, the client received all 4,649 items, sorted into categories and sections. A month later came the brief: a list of sections to keep and a request to remove anything no longer relevant. From that list I built the structure of the new catalog: two groups, 120 sections, 2,507 items. By agreement with the client, 2,142 items were removed: cable and wire, pipeline valves and fittings, transformers. The architectural decision was to drop the CMS. The old site was hacked through its engine, while a static site with no admin panel and no executable code has nothing to break into. Pages are generated by a script from a single catalog file, so all 2,507 product cards look consistent and can be rebuilt in minutes. I built the filters on parameters extracted from item names: width, height, steel thickness, design version. Prices are not shown on the site because they are outdated. The catalog leads to a request for a quote. Along the way I found issues in the data that only the client can resolve: duplicate product codes, two different lists of the company's customers, filters that are useless for certain sections. All of them went to the client as a list rather than being fixed silently.
What changed
On October 2, the demo site was approved in two variants. On October 4, the client saw a working catalog: sections, subsections, consistent product cards and filters. We are now agreeing on the design and the set of filters for each section. A catalog that for years had been filled in haphazardly is now a structured database. The risk of another hack has been removed by architecture, not by passwords.
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