Live traffic problem – Wordfence showing unkown location

Hi @pbiron
Yes, most likely your hosting provider didn’t downgrade anything, we recently had to update the software on our servers due to compliance which means we had to stop supporting some older SSL ciphers. What is happening is that your site is trying to connect to Wordfence servers but failing because the connection method your server is using is too old.

You will need to update curl and NSS/OpenSSL. Your current SSL Version is “openSSL 0.9.8e” which was released on “01 Jul 2008”. This should be updated not only for the functionality of Wordfence and your SSL connections, but for the security of your site in general.

If you are not hosting the site yourself you will need to reach out to your host and ask them to update curl. You can include everything I have told you above as it may help them understand the issue.

Thanks.

@wfalaa: what is the minimum version of OpenSSL necessary for the correct SSL ciphers?

OpenSSL v1.0.1e is installed on the server where I am NOT having problem.

This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with curl (7.19.7) or openssl (1.0.1e-fips) version as I have the issue on one of my wf installs, and not on the other one, and both are on shared hosting by the same host. In my case I’m dealing with a friend’s install that didn’t have wordfence installed before, and got hacked. I’m getting the curl error at plugin activation, basically cannot use wordfence because of this error.

@wfalaa can I email you my report too?

Thanks.

Hello Guys,

I have getting the same issue on AWS W2012 server. I did “Start all scans remotely” enabled. I am not able to scan and I am still getting Location Unspecified in the logs.

I tried to do openssl and my server does not have that enabled. I tried to send diag log to alaa at wordfence dot com but the system said can’t send. (I tried it send it from another server that is allowed to send email) We are only using the site is read only and most ports are locked down. I opened up ports for the noc1 server group .0-32 but still not working. We do not have SSL on our site, does that matter? I kept all the plugins up to date.

BTW, we used cloudflare for DNS and their basic protection too.

In the diag log, everything else is good except the following error.

Connecting to Wordfence servers (https)
wp_remote_post() test to noc1.wordfence.com failed! Response was: cURL error 35: Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to noc1.wordfence.com:443 <br />

Please let me know.
Thanks,
S

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by skg2018.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by skg2018.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by skg2018.

We haven’t tested all historical versions of OpenSSL so we can’t say for sure that there is one version where it starts working. It’s also possible that some versions work on some operating systems but not others. And some versions have bugs. Most cases we’ve seen so far that can’t connect to Wordfence Servers have NSS or OpenSSL versions that were released 2006-2010 (8-12 years ago).

If you are having problems with some WordPress sites but not others even though they are on the same server, the problem is going to lie within those WordPress installations and not with the server software. Deactivate all other plugins and see if that fixes it.

This thread is getting confusing at this point and I don’t think it’s obvious that you are all in the exact same situation. If you have problems after upgrading SSL Version to something that was released less than 5 years ago, please start a new thread and we will try to help each person individually.

Thanks,

I got my hosting company to move the sites where I was experiencing the problem to another server, which has libcurl 7.38.0 and OpenSSL 1.0.1e and the problem has gone away. Yea!

scope33 (@scope33)
6 days, 2 hours ago
You must search in admin panel of your host provider for option php update or cURL update. In my admin panel I only change php configuration from “legacy” to “stable” and cURL version was change to version 7.38.0.

It worked !!!
THANKS !!!

Hello all,

I found my problem.. I had to update the php version on my system and have to allow https on the aws firewall to access the wordfence site..

Bingo..

Thanks,
S