Wordfence Plugin was deleted

Hi @islandwoman,
We’ve seen some people having problems with plugin updates. It doesn’t seem to only be affecting Wordfence but also other plugins. It mainly seems to appear on GoDaddy hosting though. Are you hosted on GoDaddy by any chance?

Hello wfasa,

Thank you for the reply.
Yes I am hosting with GoDaddy.
I think I should propably check my other sites.

Hi again!
Okay thanks for that info. It does sound like you’re experiencing the same issue we’ve seen with other customers recently.

These sites typically do not have error logs available unfortunately so we’ve been struggling a bit getting to the bottom of this. If you don’t have a cPanel type account where you can get error logs, then I’d recommend enabling WordPress debug mode on your sites so that when something like this happens, you’ll have some kind of trace of what may have happened.

To get Wordfence back up it should work to just delete the “wordfence” folder located in wp-content/plugins and then reinstall Wordfence from the WordPress “plugins” page. If this keeps happening though it would be important to try to catch any errors in an error log, if possible.

Hi there,

Same thing happened to my site but I am not with GoDaddy Hosting, I am with another hosting service.

For me, the entire contents of the WordFence plugin directory were deleted. I have the Premium and I found out by not receiving the 2-factor authentication I usually get when I login to WordPress.

The WordFence dashboard said there was no activity since Oct. 31, 2018 so whatever it was that deleted the contents – a script, a bot, a person or whatever, happened between then and today.

May or may not be related: When I reinstalled WordFence today, I ran a scan and one of the results said the the Akismet ReadMe file was modified. When I did a comparison, the ReadMe file version number was lowered.

Hope this is helpful.

Hi @westsidevirtual,
If the wordfence plugin folder is empty, it most likely means the plugin update failed meaning the site wasn’t able to put the new plugin files in place.

If Akismet ReadMe file was modified you probably have “high sensitivity” scanning enabled. Readme files are modified sometimes, it’s not typically an indicator of compromise.

For any issues related to premium such as two factor authentication you have to reach out to us via premium support at support.wordfence.com since we can’t discuss premium features in the forums.

Hi @islandwoman,

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’ve gone ahead and marked this thread as resolved.

Please feel free to open another thread if you’re still having issues with Wordfence.

Thanks!

Hi,

I’m hosted in Godaddy and I’ve the same issue twice.
Wordfence crashes my site and I need to disable it by FTP after that WP dashboard shows me this:
“Warning: require_once(vendor/wordfence/wf-waf/src/init.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas11_data01/69/3800769/html/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/wordfence.php on line 63

Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required ‘vendor/wordfence/wf-waf/src/init.php’ (include_path=’.:/opt/remi/php72/root/usr/share/pear:/opt/remi/php72/root/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php’) in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas11_data01/69/3800769/html/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/wordfence.php on line 63”

How can I fix this?

Thank you,