Locked/Blocked New User

Hi @gigsy2, thanks for your message.

If they and you are able to log in from some devices, but not a specific one, it’s probably unlikely what you’re seeing is linked to IP detection or a site setting. I would certainly get them to try again from a different browser to their default and/or a private/incognito window just in case something about their laptop’s browser plugins or cache is triggering the block. We have seen cases of this.

There’s an outside chance the IP they’re using appears on a blocklist, but if their phone was connected to the same network we can probably rule that out too.

Thanks,
Peter.

Hello wfpeter,

Thank you for coming back to me and giving me your advice…

We spoke to our IT company who btw don’t have anything to do with our website, they wanted admin access to take a look which I gave them mine, as the new user only has no admin access, they are only set up as a SEO Manager and this is what they have said.

They confirmed that her iPad and Laptop were unable to access the WordPress site from home or the office however, her mobile phone when on 4G was able to access it suggesting an IP address block.
We logged in with her credentials and confirmed that we were able to log in using her credentials on our machine. We were then able to see that her account had no Admin access to the site.
We got a set of credentials with admin access, logged in with those credentials and was then able to access the WordFence Firewall plugin and found where her account had been blocked and was set to stay blocked until October.
We removed the block and also added the Active Foods office IP address to the whitelist.
I’ve also confirmed that I am able to log into the site using her credentials from your office, so everything should now be resolved.

I am still at a loss because we unblocked her account on a number of occasions and reset her password and even set her up as a new user with a new name.

Can I ask would adding the office IP address to the whitelist have been the reason she stayed unblocked so to speak…

I just need to know in case this happens again what the actual problem was or what the solution was.

Hope that makes sense, sorry be babble on, but any help would be gratefully received.

Thank you
?

Hi @gigsy2, thanks for clarifying.

When you say “whitelist”, do you mean the IP was added to “Allowlisted IPs that bypass all rules?” in Wordfence or was the whitelist with Cloudflare, or another server-based solution? The Wordfence option isn’t ideal as this allows that IP to bypass all Wordfence protection but may be necessary as a short-term solution.

I would certainly try checking Live Traffic from when this user was blocked. The cause will be shown in red text when expanding the entry by clicking it (or using the “eye” icon), just to be certain that another Brute Force or Rate Limiting rule wasn’t being kicked into action instead. It may also show that their IP appears on our blocklist, which we can remove them from if it’s no longer associated with malicious activity.

Thanks again,
Peter.

Hi wfpeter,

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond, I will take a look at the live traffic and see what information we can obtain. However, it does look like she may have tried to login a number of times from various IP addresses which again may be that she was locked out after too many attempts.

Thank you for all your help, really appreciate it.

Best regards

Vicky