How to Recover a FiveM Server After a Hack

You noticed something wrong: money duplication, sudden admin abuse, or player reports of impossible behaviour. You checked the logs and the evidence is clear. Your FiveM server has been compromised. The next two hours will determine whether the attacker keeps persistent access or you reclaim full control. This guide walks you through every phase in order: contain, clean, rotate credentials, and harden so it cannot happen again.

Phase 1: Contain the Breach Immediately

Your first priority is stopping the damage clock. Do not shut the server down yet because you still need logs, but do cut external access. Disable your public listing on the CFX master list, set your server to private, and kick or ban the suspected accounts. If you already have ban logs from a previous session, cross-reference them now. While you are doing this, export a full copy of your current server.cfg, your resources folder, and any database tables related to player accounts and economy. You will need these as forensic evidence and as a restore baseline.

Before you go further, read through the signs your FiveM server has been hacked to confirm you have identified all active compromises. Attackers rarely enter through one vector. A visible exploit in the economy is often a distraction from a quieter backdoor planted in a custom script.

Phase 2: Audit and Clean Every Resource

This is the most labour-intensive phase and the one most owners rush, which is exactly why re-infections are so common. Pull every resource out of the active folder and inspect each one before allowing it back on the server.

• 1. Compare against a known-good source. For open-source scripts, diff your copy against the official repository at the same commit. Any unexplained addition is suspect.
• 2. Search for remote execution patterns. Grep your Lua files for load(, pcall(load, ExecuteCommand called with a variable, and HTTP callbacks that write to disk. Legitimate scripts almost never use these patterns at runtime.
• 3. Check obfuscated files. Heavily obfuscated scripts from unknown sources are the single most common backdoor delivery mechanism. If you cannot read it, do not run it.
• 4. Audit ACE permissions in server.cfg. Look for any add_ace or add_principal lines that were not there before. Attackers frequently plant permission escalations in config files because owners rarely re-read them.
• 5. Review the database. Check admin tables for accounts you do not recognise and economy tables for impossible balances. Roll back any rows created or modified during the attack window if your database has binary logs.

A thorough script security process is covered in the FiveM server security checklist for 2026, which also covers dependency pinning and update hygiene to prevent future contamination.

Phase 3: Rotate Every Credential

Assume the attacker read your entire server.cfg and any .env files on the machine. That means every secret in those files is burned. Rotate all of the following before you bring the server back online:

Generate a new CFX server license key from the Cfx.re keymaster portal. Change every database password and update the connection string. Rotate your Discord bot credentials, your webhook URLs, and any API keys used by economy or logging scripts. If your hosting panel uses a shared SSH key or password, regenerate it. Finally, audit which Discord roles carry in-game admin and remove anyone who should not retain that access after the incident.

Do not reuse any credential that existed before the breach. The attacker may have exfiltrated and stored them offline. A credential that was valid yesterday is still valid today unless you explicitly invalidate it.

Phase 4: Restore in a Clean State

Only re-enable resources that passed the audit in Phase 2. Bring the server back up in private mode first and verify core systems, economy, and admin tools with a small group of trusted staff before opening to the public. Watch the server logs actively during this burn-in period. If anything looks wrong, shut down again immediately rather than trying to diagnose a live production server with players on it.

Restore player data from a backup taken before the attack window. If you do not have pre-attack backups, you will need to make judgement calls about which economy entries to trust. This is a painful lesson in why automated daily database snapshots are non-negotiable.

Phase 5: Harden Against the Next Attempt

Recovery is only complete when the conditions that allowed the breach no longer exist. The most effective structural change you can make is adding a server-side layer that validates every event and every economy transaction in real time, so rogue script calls are caught before they execute rather than discovered in logs after the fact.

Understanding how FiveM backdoor protection works will help you close the specific vectors attackers use most. Beyond anticheat coverage, enforce the principle of least privilege in your ACE tree so that a compromised script can only affect the systems it legitimately needs to touch. Separate your admin-level resources from player-facing ones and run them under different resource groups with explicit permission grants.

Schedule a monthly script audit. Most servers that get hacked a second time were re-infected through a dependency that was updated without review. Pin your script versions and review every update diff before deploying it.

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