Octave Cyberattack: How Lyophilise & Co Rebuilt Their E-commerce in 4 Days with PrestaShop

When a cyberattack knocks your e-commerce platform offline at peak season, every hour matters. The Lyophilise & Co story, recently published on the PrestaShop blog, is a textbook case for why owning your code matters — a conviction I defend every day at Mediacom87.

A cyberattack that took down 80 stores at once

On the night of 15–16 August 2024, the SaaS platform Octave was hit by ransomware that knocked 80 online stores offline within hours. Among them: Lyophilise & Co, a specialist in freeze-dried food based in Lorient (Brittany), serving sailors, hikers and outdoor professionals. The company generates €5.7M in revenue, 95% of which comes from online sales.

Founder Ariane Pehrson refused to wait the 3-week to 6-month recovery window quoted by her cyber-insurance expert and made a radical decision: rebuild from scratch on a different platform.

Why PrestaShop? Full ownership of the data

The following Wednesday, the team reached out to Soledis, a PrestaShop Expert agency. Three options were considered: Shopify, Odoo and PrestaShop. PrestaShop won for a reason every merchant burned by a SaaS incident will instantly recognise: full ownership of the source code, the databases, and the ability to redeploy from a backup at any time.

Data ownership isn't a technical detail — it's a strategic asset. In a crisis, it's the difference between going out of business and restarting.

A PrestaShop deployment in just 4 days

The technical challenge was massive. In the middle of August, with reduced summer staff, Soledis deployed in just four days:

• The full server infrastructure
• A working PrestaShop instance, with the original visual identity recovered from archive.org
• The myFulfillment module (Boostmyshop) for logistics, procurement and shipping
• Store Commander for bulk catalogue management
• SoraCaisse for the physical store integration

On the Lyophilise & Co side, the entire team — accountants and warehouse staff included — spent two days rebuilding product sheets, images and stock data from files scattered across employee computers. By Friday, just 4 days after the rebuild started, a first version of the site was back in production. Daily revenue, which had collapsed from €20–25k to under €2k, could finally start climbing again.

The cost of the incident

Two weeks of complete downtime cost the business €375,000 in lost revenue. At the time of the original article, traffic was still at only 50% of normal levels — limited to SEO and direct visits while Google Ads and Shopping campaigns awaited a fully rebuilt catalogue.

What this success story teaches us

This experience illustrates three principles I consistently defend with my clients and in every module I build:

1. Open source is business continuity insurance

With PrestaShop, you own everything: code, data, theme, modules. No vendor can shut you down. That's your first line of defence against the risk of a SaaS platform going dark.

2. A mature module ecosystem is a crisis accelerator

Soledis didn't reinvent the wheel: the agency assembled proven building blocks (myFulfillment, Store Commander, SoraCaisse). That's exactly the philosophy behind my own module catalogue, designed to integrate cleanly across PrestaShop 1.6 through 9.0.

3. Regular data backups and exports are non-negotiable

Without recent exports, even the best team can't rebuild anything. Several of my modules address this need directly: catalogue export, supplier export, translation backup, order archiving. The question isn't "if" a disaster will happen, but "when".

Ariane Pehrson's recommendations

In the original article, the founder shares five pieces of advice from her experience:

• Choose an open-source solution for full control of your data
• Take out cyber-risk insurance
• Export and back up your data regularly — essential to claim your insurance
• If disaster strikes: notify your insurer immediately, file a police report, and notify your data protection authority (mind the legal deadlines)
• Take care of yourself — it's a marathon, not a sprint

Need to audit your PrestaShop store's resilience?

Backups, automated exports, business continuity modules, disaster recovery plans… If you run a mission-critical store and want to stress-test your strategy before disaster strikes, get in touch.

Source: Survival lesson: how Lyophilise & Co saved their e-commerce in 4 days — PrestaShop blog (French)