Checking ‘Enable Ban Lists’ crashes all sites several times daily

@russell-cardwell

How does that ‘bad code’ in the .htaccess file exactly looks like ?

Side note to @pronl (yes, I’m pinging you on purpose): Please stop @ ing users in these forums in these replies. That’s excessive and considered abusive. If they want to get an email for their topic then they can subscribe to their own topic.

Also I’ve removed your posted email on your profile. Don’t repost that again, that’s not what these forums are for.

I dsabled Ban Lists, and that worked for a while. But even with that feature disabled, iThemes Security is still writing ipv6 addresses to the .htaccess file, resulting in 500 errors.

It does not happen multiple times per day now, but it still brings down my site frequently. For the poster above who wants to know what ‘bad code’ looks like, this code crashes the site routinely:

# BEGIN iThemes Security - Do not modify or remove this line
# iThemes Security Config Details: 2
# Quick ban IP. Will be updated on next formal rules save.
SetEnvIF REMOTE_ADDR "^2001:41d0:2:8ac5:0:0:0:0$" DenyAccess
SetEnvIF X-FORWARDED-FOR "^2001:41d0:2:8ac5:0:0:0:0$" DenyAccess
SetEnvIF X-CLUSTER-CLIENT-IP "^2001:41d0:2:8ac5:0:0:0:0$" DenyAccess
<IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
	<RequireAll>
		Require all granted
		Require not env DenyAccess
		Require not ip 2001:41d0:2:8ac5:0:0:0:0
	</RequireAll>
</IfModule>
<IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
	Order allow,deny
	Deny from env=DenyAccess
	Deny from 2001:41d0:2:8ac5:0:0:0:0
	Allow from all
</IfModule>
# END iThemes Security - Do not modify or remove this line

Like I said previously, writing ipv6 addresses to the .htaccess file crashes the site resulting in 500 errors every time. Turning off ‘Enable Ban Lists’ slows, but does not stop iThemes Security from writing this code. I have to manually edit the .htaccess file to remove it several times a week.

Is the solution to block iThemes Security from writing to the .htaccess file? Wouldn’t that affect a lot of other features?

Or is the solution to delete iThemes Security, since their solution seems to be at least as bad as the problem?

There appears to be no support, and no information on their site or elsewhere that suggessts a solution. Any ideas?

More than 2 weeks. No response from iThemes. Despite ‘Enable Ban Lists’ being turned off, ithemes continues to write the same bad code to the .htaccess file, taking the site down on a regular basis.

I installed this because a hacker took my site down about a year ago. But the hacker never did as much damage as iThemes Security.

Looking for a more competent security solution.

We are experiencing this exact same issue on multiple site running ithemes.

Disable ithemes is the only solution short term if you want to avoid this.