Constantly being locked out of one of my sites

  • Resolved rinthm

    (@rinthm)


    4 years, 7 months ago

    Hello,

    I am being constantly locked out of one of my sites and I can’t figure out why. My IP address is whitelisted, and about 6 times now I have deactivated Wordfence, disabled the firewall with WordFence Assistant, then reactivated the firewall and checked for what might be the reason. Don’t see anything that could be causing the block, especially since my IP is whitelisted. But it usually will block me out again after a day or so.

    The block reason is: “You have been temporarily locked out of this system. This means that you will not be able to log in for a while.”

    Furthermore, sending the unblock email never works. Sometimes it says it sent but doesn’t, and other times I’ll get an error message with something about the browser (can’t remember and can’t recreate it right now unfortunately).

    Any help is appreciated, thanks!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Support WFAdam

    (@wfadam)

    Hello @rinthm and thanks for reaching out.

    If you are locked out and not receiving unlock emails but can’t wait for lockout time to expire and need immediate site access, please use FTP/SFTP — or any file manager your web host provides via their administration panel. Look inside the /wp-content/plugins/ directory and rename the wordfence directory. Once you have logged in to your WordPress admin you can name the folder back again and change the setting that caused you to be locked out.

    Just so you are aware, the unlock emails actually come from your website and not our servers. If you aren’t getting emails it usually boils down to one of a few errors.

    • The emails (they come from [email protected]) are getting sent to your junk mail folder by your email client or provider. Make sure and whitelist or add your website to the list of safe domains so you get emails consistently.
    • Your web server is having a problem with the email software on it. This isn’t like regular emails you send and receive, but rather server alert messages. Usually, a restart of postfix or sendmail (whichever is installed) can fix it. Your hosting provider may need to help with this.
    • Your hosting provider has disabled SMTP from the server for some reason like preventing the server from being used to spam people.

    As for the constantly being locked out, have you tried to watch your Live Traffic to see exactly what is causing the block? Is there any particular action you are performing when the block occurs? You could also attempt to put the Firewall into Learning Mode.

    From the Wordfence Dashboard click on Manage WAF. Then you will see Basic Firewall Options > Web Application Firewall Status. Change the option to Learning Mode. Now perform the actions that were causing issues. This will help Wordfence learn that these actions are normal and it will allow them in the future. After you have finished performing the actions, switch the WAF from Learning Mode back to Enabled and Protecting. Now test to see if these actions work correctly.

    https://www.wordfence.com/help/firewall/learning-mode/ is an amazing resource for learning more about the WAF and learning mode.

    Let me know if any of this helped!

    Thanks!

    Thread Starter rinthm

    (@rinthm)

    Thanks for your reply,

    I’m not doing anything in particular when I get locked out. I deactivate Wordfence (following the procedure you mentioned), use WordFence Assistant to deactivate firewall, then reactivate WordFence. Then, within a day or two I will be randomly locked out, even if I wasn’t doing anything on the site. My IP is whitelisted so I don’t know why that doesn’t seem to have any effect. Changing browsers has no effect — still locked out.

    I have recently found that I am only locked out of wp-admin; I can visit the front-end of the site just fine.

    I am not able to find where I was locked out in Live Traffic since I don’t know exactly when I’m getting locked out and it is flooded with other lockouts.

    A bit at a loss here — let me know if I can provide any more info that might be helpful.

    Thanks.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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