WordFence Deleted – Cannot Re-Install – Possible Hack?

  • Resolved mwarbinek

    (@mwarbinek)


    7 years, 7 months ago

    On a website that has WordPress install by GoDaddy, WordFence plugin suddenly disappeared. The plugin folder is still there (via FTP), but empty. I tried to reinstall WordFence via WordPress Admin and the install failed.

    The error message said, “Installation failed: Could not copy file. wordfence/images/icons/ajax24.gif”

    This just happened, the disappearance of WordFence from the WordPress site and a fail on a reinstall.

    My will first guess was a GoDaddy quirk, since some plugins won’t work with their WordPress hosting, yet a second website I have is also on GoDaddy, same hosting, yet WordFence is still installed and working. So this leads me to suspect that this could be a possible hack that succeeded against WordFence?

    Any clue to what is happening?

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by mwarbinek.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hi @mwarbinek,
    Do you have any idea if Wordfence auto-update option was working fine before this incident or not? also, when was the last time you logged into your website and found Wordfence still active there?

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter mwarbinek

    (@mwarbinek)

    It appears the auto-update was working.

    I logged in a couple days before and I also get emails notifications that came from the website, the last email from the site was May 1st 2017.

    I went into the website last night and there were network issues that kept knocking me out with 503’s and unavailable pages. I also went into the file/folder structure (FTP) and deleted the plug-in folder which appeared empty before, but the FTP client showed a long list of files it was deleting. I have no idea why this all went crazy like that and why it was just that one site.

    I re-installed the plugin, finally, last night and it succeeded. I checked the site this morning and all was fine, Wordfence was working and the file structure was fine.

    I did speak with Go-Daddy support last night and they determined I was having Network access issues which did clear up.

    So, I have no idea what was happening. Maybe I was thrown into another dimension by the quirky network stream and saw an alternate universe with the missing Wordfence plug-in. Lucky for me, I am back, … or… my Ethernet world is back to normal (for now).

    It could be many things related to these “Network access issues” reported! perhaps the server couldn’t manage to connect to www.ads-software.com servers to fetch the update package while the plugin update was initiated.

    I’m glad you managed to get the plugin reinstalled and working fine for now, let’s revisit this issue if it surfaced again in the future.

    Thanks.

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