oliverkardos

Hello Peter!

Thank you for your prompt reply & taking the time to diagnose this with your team! I really appreciate your help because this is a critical issue to me.

Upon digging further, it seems that you are right – the were numerous questionable connections from my host to my website (shared hosting).

Some of them don’t even have WPROCKET user agent, so then again, you are spot on! Actually, the first blocked requests were empty POST requests with empty user agents!

I’ll contact my host and I’m sorry if this was a false alarm. However, this is a real issue (regardless of whether it’s an attack or not), I think WordFence should at least put up a warning note or an email if it blocks the address that belongs to the host, or at least in cases if it blocks an address to which cache GET requests originate from. WordFence can easily tell if the said wordpress installation has a caching plugin or not,because it can list the installed plugins.

Thank you.

here is my loghttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1oHbPpAlqqUsKWkszSpt-eU6DEestiRFj/view?usp=sharing

IP blocking is not enough, because one can easily switch IP addresses. (via proxy/VPN)

You should deploy recaptcha and set its probability target to very high (0.8 to 0.9) – this will filter out bots. You can deploy recaptcha all forms: registration, comments, contact forms, login form, registration form…
Also use AKISMET to filter spam in case he still goes through – on all comment forms and contacts forms.

I’m afraid you won’t be able to block registration attempts completely as some bots can pass recaptcha. Instead you should restrict his abilities after he is registered.
Oh, and don’t forget to protect your admin page likewise.

Make sure DKIM and SPF are set up for your domain name. These help emails to get “trusted”. Your hosting provider can help you set these up.

Also make sure to install a plugin for (real) SMTP and fill in your SMTP credentials. Unless this is done, WordPress would resort to PHPMailer which isn’t good, it won’t be trusted by mail providers.

It is also entirely possible that GMail is being overzealous on this. You should just set up another mail account to receive these alerts into.

Hello,

Thank you for following up!
My issue appears to be the same as here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/activation-on-a-multisite-network-wide-fatal-error/

I’ll set up a clone site for further testing to see what I can find. As for now, I had to switch to another plugin for such functionality. ?? I’m sad because now I lost my popup theme!

I’ll soon contact you when I have more details.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by oliverkardos.

Hello Peter!

Thank you so much for your prompt reply!

I was able to solve it thanks to your super instructions! I was combing through WordFence’s PHP source files trying to determine how the adding logic worked and even though I found this inet6_aton() method, it never occured to me that I needed to add ::ffff: to the beginning of the IPv4 address. But surely this is an efficient way of storing data as now I can see that you are able to store both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the same table, reducing the number of lookup queries. Smart!

You’re also right that 600 IPs in a list is just too much. I am working on determining ranges and patterns and by that, I think will be able to reduce this to about 80. Many of them can be converted into ranges, and actually I can replace some of them with a country-level block.
Still, 80 IPs is more than what is convenient to type in by hand. So I will use this manual query to insert them into the DB.

I ask you to please consider adding an IP list import option. In my opinion it would make the life of new users easier, who could be migrating from other security plugins. And it is not just IP addresses but IP ranges, too, that would be great to import on a nice graphical interface. I am willing to do it in SQL but not everyone will be. Please consider that ??

Hello!

Thank you so much for your prompt reply! I highly appreciate that you actively monitor feedback here and that you’re willing to help! As such I’m improving my rating to 4* .

Meanwhile, I decided I will settle with the mentioned workaround. I activated it site-by-site. The reason for that is because some of my sites now have a separate domain (using domain mapping) and it is easier to process statistics this way.

But stil, like I said I would like the team to fix centrally activated instances for multisite. I imagine there are many multisite installations that operate in subfolder mode, meaning they share a single domain, on which this central configuration mode would make sense, actually I had my site running like that until last week.