User Locked Out From Signing In – Weird Problem

  • I get these email alerts almost on a daily basis, the other day I had about five of them in a few minutes. The weird thing is that the IP address given appears to an internal network address. I admit I am not well versed in these matters but have done a whois lookup and all the details are my own details.

    I have one machine on this network and it can’t be anyone else who has access to the machine. I thought I could solve the problem but blocking any user that tries to login using ‘admin’ (which they are) and also to block any username that doesn’t exist but this seems to only bring my entire site down (inc wp-admin) with a 403 Permission Denied error.

    I’m a bit confused what might be causing these alerts. Any ideas?

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordfence/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • The following document should help explain what Wordfence does with private IP addresses. The short answer is that you are either getting internal visits or there is a misconfiguration.

    https://docs.wordfence.com/en/How_Wordfence_handles_Private_Addresses

    Thanks,
    Brian

    I have the same problem, get emails like this all the time:

    A user with IP address 162.144.37.78 has been locked out from the signing in or using the password recovery form for the following reason: Exceeded the maximum number of login failures which is: 20. The last username they tried to sign in with was: ”

    And no username is provided. That IP is my hosting account IP address.

    If there is a misconfiguration, how to detect it and fix it?

    Thread Starter rtorblephoto

    (@rtorblephoto)

    Ah, I always get the username ‘admin’. It’s definitely the same IP address as the one I use to login though. The weird thing is my actual username isn’t admin.

    The only thing I can think of, off the top of my head, is it’s a backup plugin that I use. I have deactivated it to see if that stops the notifications.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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