Better WP Security 3.3 v WordPress 3.4.1

  • Hello,

    It seems that Better WP Security 3.3 and WordPress 3.4.1 may not be able to play nicely together.

    After functioning well for a short while, today Better WP Security pretty much took down my whole website, and sent me over 600 emails to tell me about it.

    Each email said “A file (or files) on your site at https://www.mydomain.com have been changed. Please review the report below to verify changes are not the result of a compromise.” There was no report to look at, but there never has been since I installed the plugin.

    When I went to my website, my front page was a 404. When I logged into WordPress as admin, it told me I had 0 posts, 0 pages, 0 comments… phpMyAdmin told me otherwise – nothing had changed.

    When I looked at my website file manager, I saw that no files had changed there either – not even my .htaccess. I renamed the wp-better-security folder in my plugins to disable it, and removed all reference to Better WP Security from the .htaccess file.

    I was relieved to see that my site started working correctly again, and – thankfully – the automated emails stopped.

    I love what Better WP Security had been doing so far, and I had some peace of mind that it was running (aside from the blank emails mentioned above; I’d been advised of bad login attempts and everything) – but this was pretty stressful and I’m hesitant to re-install Better WP Security again until I know what may have caused this issue.

    Just my $0.02 in case something similar happens to your site.

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

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  • Wow! Sorry to hear that happened. This is something I haven’t seen anywhere else. Do you still have the error logs from that time so that I might look into what caused the issue? If so please email me at info [at] bit51 [dot] com.

    I had the exact same thing happen to my installation. I initially thought my site had been hacked. I reinstalled everything WordPress, themes, and plugins. 12 hours later it started again. I started receiving an huge number of emails saying some files on the site had changed (site unresponsive, couldn’t log in). After searching the internet I came upon this conversation. I reinstalled everything again (this time it wasn’t as painful as I had a backup from the morning), deactivated Better Security and now site seems good again.

    I had been using Better Security for a couple of months now without issue and suddenly this problem occurred. I have 2 wordpress sites on the same server (subdomains) but only one of the 2 sites had this issue (however the site with the issue has a larger number of vistors). The first time this happened the error log grew very large (almost 2GB) however I deleted that after my first reinstallation.

    @h1894244….

    Are you using any database caching?

    How would I check if I am using database caching? I didn’t change any default database settings. One other thing I remembered is that I tried several of the options that may have issues with plugins or themes. Maybe one of those caused this to happen?

    The options could be. As for database caching, if you don’t know you probably aren’t however your host may still have some opcode caching (APC) on for your account which could have the same effect.

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