A Host I Banned Was Still Able to Visit Site

  • I banned a host the other day for repeatedly sending spam comments via the Contact Us form that I use on the site. I put the IP address that the contact form plugin provided as that user’s IP address in the ban hosts form under the settings for iThemes Security.

    Well, this afternoon, I got another spam message via the contact form at the same site, and it was from that same IP address. So banning that IP address in the iThemes security apparently did not have any effect at all.

    Please advise…

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/better-wp-security/

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • This plugin used to handle banning people that were accessing your site through a proxy server. Now it is not. If you want this feature back, you need to install the pre-4.0 version of the plugin…

    https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/better-wp-security.3.6.6.zip

    Thread Starter jrbrunet

    (@jrbrunet)

    Thank you. I have downloaded the older version again and will seriously consider using it instead. For now, I put the IP address in my cpanel IP Deny section. It will be interesting to see how well that works.

    If they are using a proxy server, then the cpanel IP deny won’t help either. As far as the web server or cpanel are concerned the IP address connecting to the server is the IP address of the of the proxy server, not the IP address of the attacker.

    Many proxy servers will report to the web server what the actual IP address of the user is with special headers. Better WP Security used to take advantage of this and would block connections from proxy servers that were passing through from the actual attacker.

    But since version 4.0, this capability went away. The plug-in now provides less security than before. ??

    See my post here for more information on the problems caused by the 4.0+ versions of this plugin when it comes to blocking IP addresses.

    Thread Starter jrbrunet

    (@jrbrunet)

    Thank you. Your info was very helpful.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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