Admin permissions changing by themselves

  • I will first give a background of everything:

    We have a fully developed WordPress site designed using DIVI by Elegant Themes.

    We have a range of 23 plugins installed (I would say that 98% of them are essential for us to have – unless you could suggest an alternative).

    That is a short background.

    Now I’ll explain the problem that we are experiencing:

    A week ago I noticed that even though I am the administrator of my site, i was denied access to check for plugin, theme and WordPress updates. When I looked at my dashboard I noticed that the “Updates” option had disappeared as well as the options to add or edit any plugins or themes. i.e. My admin permission/rights had been changed, and I had not changed them, and I don’t know how to change them back again.

    So I reached out to my host support and they re-installed the WordPress core files and that fixed the problem, and I thought everything would now be ok.

    The next morning the problem was back again. I had lost access to plugin and theme updates and edits. And so I contacted host support again and they re-installed WP again and solved the problem again.

    But the next morning the problem was back. I then tried disabling all plugins and changing the theme but nothing helped. So Host support helped me again to re-install WP and change back the permissions.

    I suspected that my plugin WP Rocket was the problem as I read an article about ‘nonces’ and so I disabled WP Rocket for the night but the problem was back again. My host support then helped again and suggested that WP 5.3.2 may be the problem, so they put me back to WP 5.3.1. but the problem still persists.

    I have searched the forum for answers and tried recommendations but nothing seems to help.

    I don’t know anymore what to do? I would be so grateful for any help.

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

    (@contentiskey)

    -have you checked directly in the database tables to see if there is anything unusual? (especially users and user meta tables)
    -have you checked for any malware/hacking?
    (normally, you can access database tables in PHPMYADMIN area in webhosting account)

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by lisa.
    Thread Starter jacko613

    (@jacko613)

    Thank you. I will check. What do I do if I do find something strange or that I had been hacked? Do I restore back to an earlier date? Would that solve everything?

    Hello!
    Are you still experiencing issues with your site backend? Can you ask your host to run a malware scan for your site? This won’t solve the problem nor can give a 100% valid answer for having a hacked website or not but it’s certainly a starting point to solving your backend issues.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Admin permissions changing by themselves’ is closed to new replies.