Wordfence site locking circumstances?

  • Under what situation would Wordfence block access to my site? This is a bit vague because I have not been able to recreate the situation, or test various steps.

    What happened was: I received an email from a client that their site was locked. I went to the site homepage and found that access was blocked by Wordfence. This is a very high traffic site so I didn’t spend much time trying to figure out why, I just disabled Wordfence. However I love the plugin and would like to continue to use it, but need to be sure that site access won’t be affected for legitimate users.

    – Everyone who experienced the blocking (to my knowledge) was a logged in Administrator and I didn’t think to test while not logged in.
    – The site was a WordPress Network, and I didn’t think to test if it was just the root site or all of the subsites that were also blocked.

    I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of details due to the reasons I stated above, so I thought I would check and see under what exact circumstances might that occur. Is this something to be concerned about?

    Any information is appreciated.

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

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  • Two things come to mind..

    • The ip’s being reported to Wordfence started showing up as one ip, usually the server ip address, which blocked everyone because the hits exceeded the number set in the firewall rules.
    • One of the Administrators ticked a setting that managed to block the Administrators out. Not sure how, but it’s one of the reasons I rarely have more than a few admins on a site. They tend to ‘forget’ when they make changes that break things.

    I don’t think I would be overly concerned about a hacker or something before investigating this route first.

    tim

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