I cannot install Wordfence…

  • Hi – i am pretty good wordpress user – but i’ve been hacked. I can’t install word fence or any other plug ins using my admin account (or any other account i’ve set up with admin rights). This extends to the fact i can’t even upload/upgrade to the latest WP version. It’s an injection URL issue (According to google)

    I think the hack has affected my ability to be an admin.

    Any ideas – this is pretty excruciating!

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  • Something that may work (please take this with a grain of salt – I commando pretty much everything when working with my wordpress sites so this may not be the proper way to do it, but this is how I got WF on a hacked site that locked out plugin privs if I recall correctly)

    (quick edit: you need access to the server for this.)

    First, download the plugin, should have it as a zip. Upload that to wp-content/plugins and unzip it so the Wordfence folder is there. Once it’s there and unzipped, hop into PHPmyadmin and go to the table Options, then to the row active_plugins. Add a new line inside the brackets like so, where X is the next number in the row (if you look at the plugins list, you should see an i:0 in the first row, i:1 in the next, and so forth) and Y is the length of the string that references the location of the main plugin file in the plugins directory. As a note, just checked, should be 23 characters, so the added line should look like so:

    i:X;s:23:”wordfence/wordfence.php”;

    This will enable the plugin for the website.

    Again, please use this as a last resort if the WF peeps don’t respond in an appropriate time. Again, I’m not a pro with this kinda stuff so I don’t know if this is the proper way to do it, but it worked for me. Cheers!

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by cipherbeta.

    Hi @philchan1974,

    I’m sorry you’re having to deal with such a situation. I understand how frustrating this can be.
    Assuming that you (still) have SSH or FTP access to your site’s server, I suggest you look into this article in which we provide some steps to clean a hacked WordPress site.

    Let me know if this helps.

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