Case Studies
Proven in production.
Read how enterprise hosts, agencies, and MSPs use CleanShift to survive critical incidents and automate server security.
Large E-Commerce Hosting Provider
A flagship CloudLinux 9 server (8 Cores, 93GB RAM) was experiencing critical load spikes (18.7+ average) causing mail delivery failures for major enterprise clients. The legacy firewall and AV solutions (CSF, Imunify360) were active but failed to stabilize the server, with a massive backlog of 4,665+ stale lock files and 136 queued emails.
The CleanShift Solution
CleanShift agent was deployed to diagnose the root cause beyond file-level scanning. CleanShift identified a catastrophic loop between dovecot LMTP permission failures, systemd journal flooding (50k logs/min), and a misconfigured fail2ban process that was burning 65% of the CPU parsing the journal.
Impact & Results
- Server load reduced by 77% (from 18.74 down to 4.24) within minutes.
- fail2ban CPU usage dropped from 65% to 1.0%.
- Cleared 4,665 stale lock files and restored 100% mail delivery instantly.
- Applied surgical SGID permission fixes without requiring server reboots.
Digital Agency Managed Server
Following the CVE-2024-28000 (LiteSpeed Cache) disclosure, an agency managing 34 high-traffic WordPress sites experienced a severe compromise. Their existing security solution (Imunify360) quarantined 2 file-level backdoors but missed the underlying database-level malware. Sites were actively serving SEO spam and redirecting visitors, despite scanning 'clean'.
The CleanShift Solution
CleanShift's Deep Scan mode was executed across the entire server. Unlike legacy scanners, CleanShift analyzed the databases and identified rogue admin accounts and obfuscated wp_options payload injections that were dynamically executing the spam.
Impact & Results
- Detected 2,847 database-level threats completely missed by legacy AV.
- Found and removed 412 rogue wp_admin injections across 30 infected sites.
- CleanShift's Cross-Site Correlation instantly protected the remaining 4 clean sites on the server.
- Full automated remediation completed in under 12 minutes.
Specialized Media Hosting Platform
A cPanel server hosting media-heavy WordPress sites was targeted by an aggressive, distributed XML-RPC and REST API brute-force attack originating from over 4,000 unique IPs. The volume of requests exhausted the PHP-FPM pools, taking all hosted sites offline. IP blocking at the firewall level was too slow to adapt to the rotating proxies.
The CleanShift Solution
CleanShift Guard (the real-time PHP mu-plugin) was enabled globally via the CLI. Instead of waiting for firewall drops, CleanShift Guard intercepted the abusive requests directly at the WordPress bootstrap phase, consuming less than 1ms per blocked request and preventing PHP-FPM exhaustion.
Impact & Results
- Sites restored to 99.99% uptime within 60 seconds of Guard deployment.
- Intercepted and dropped 1.2 million abusive API requests over 24 hours with zero disk I/O.
- PHP-FPM pool usage dropped from 100% exhaustion back to a nominal 15%.
- No legitimate user traffic or webhook callbacks were affected.
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