zeromost

Many thanks for your reply. My host assures me that it’s very much a Brute Force attack in progress (now going on more than 72 hours) and that there’s nothing I can do but wait it out. So it seems there’s nothing I can install now while under sttack via FTP to make any difference. Once it’s over I’ll be looking for plugins to prevent any future such attacks.
Regards.

Thank you for your messages.

Regarding the suggestion about a DDoS and not a brute force attack, I contacted the host and have been told by them that it’s a brute force attack. I’ve been told I’ll just have to wait out the end of the attack before they remove the 503 Service Unavailable notice.

Regarding the remedies for fixing the service, I have tried renaming/disabling the installed plugins and templates as suggested, but this seems to have had no effect.

The impression I’m left with is that some external agent is persisting in trying to guess its way into my wp-admin.php password despite the host shutting things down with the 503 Service notice. But after the time already elapsed, I can’t make any sense of the attacker carrying on. I gather Microsoft did a survey of 50000+ brute-force attacks and found that they lasted on average 48-72 hours. But no mention was made of the host using the 503 Service measure.

Thanks for your advice. I’m afraid things aren’t going well. I couldn’t locate the error log via FTP access. I tried renaming the theme. That had no effect. I tried renaming the plugin folder. That didn’t work either.
The error message I get – when it displays – is 503 Service Error, if this is useful.
What’s odd is that my access to wp-admin and the disappearance of the header image seem to have been the result of the automatic upgrade to 5.9.1. I didn’t myself make any changes to the site.
Any further suggestions?

Many thanks, James. The widgets issue seems quite solved. I’d no idea about this factor. I’m still seeing the page count box from within the admin View Page side, but, as you say, this may not be seen by visitors.
Stan

Thanks for your reply. I was dreading that as a solution. I have a very slow and often interrupted internet service, so such large files are often lost. The last WordPress update install I did via FTP which was very slow. I was hoping there might be a particular file in the WP location I could replace by FTP. Have you any suggestions?

Correction on URL

Many thanks. I’m hoping this works.

Thanks for this. I eventually got WP503 operational with a manual update. Lately I’ve had problems with automatic updates on both my sites – sometimes install failure, sometimes non-fatal warnings. It may be an issue with byethost. When such error messages arise, my host usually suggests manual installation. These typically succeed.

I’d like to know if for manual installations there’s a way round uploading all the material; i.e., whether there’s a simple way of uploading just changed material without each file having to be checked against the new material. The usual advice for manual updates is to completely remove (or overwrite) all of wp-admin and wp-includes.

Thanks very much for this. The problem was caused by my having used different names in the General settings.
It seems otherwise there are no issues with the plugins.
Stan

Thanks.
The manual update to 5.0.1 was the required step.
Stan

Thanks, James.
In the meanwhile before I tried a manual update, I received a message from <[email protected]> notifying me that:

“Howdy! Your site at https://hardlynatural.byethost7.com has been updated automatically to WordPress 4.9.9.”

When I tried to logon to the site wp-admin, I was greeted with a Fatal Error screen with the following information:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined method WP_Screen::is_block_editor() in /home/vol9_7/byethost7.com/b7_15528940/htdocs/wp-includes/script-loader.php:2385 Stack trace: #0 /home/vol9_7/byethost7.com/b7_15528940/htdocs/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(286): wp_common_block_scripts_and_styles(‘index.php’) #1 /home/vol9_7/byethost7.com/b7_15528940/htdocs/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(310): WP_Hook->apply_filters(NULL, Array) #2 /home/vol9_7/byethost7.com/b7_15528940/htdocs/wp-includes/plugin.php(453): WP_Hook->do_action(Array) #3 /home/vol9_7/byethost7.com/b7_15528940/htdocs/wp-admin/admin-header.php(97): do_action(‘admin_enqueue_s…’, ‘index.php’) #4 /home/vol9_7/byethost7.com/b7_15528940/htdocs/wp-admin/index.php(100): include(‘/home/vol9_7/by…’) #5 {main} thrown in /home/vol9_7/byethost7.com/b7_15528940/htdocs/wp-includes/script-loader.php on line 2385

Any advice as to how I might get things back to WP 4.9.8 which seems not to have had any issues? Am I right in thinking this is probably due to plugin incompatibilities? If so, can plugins be de-activated just by renaming the files via FTP?
Regards
Stan

It looks as if the manual installation has done the trick. The latest update is operating as it should. Many thanks again for your patience and sound advice.
Stan

Sorry! I just noticed where the DL is. I’ll see a manual installation does the trick.

Many thanks again for your suggestions. It’s an odd problem because I’ve had no other difficulty with previous updates – and, as I mentioned, I’ve had no problem with thus update on my other WordPress-based website on byethost7.com.
For manually uploading the plugin, where would I be able to get a copy of the zip?

Once again, in trying to install from scratch I get the same error message as before:

Unpacking the package…
Installing the plugin…
Destination folder already exists. /home/vol4_5/byethost4.com/b4_9838509/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/wp-statistics/
Plugin install failed.

And, sure enough, the folder has been written to the plugins directory.