Question relating the htaccess file

I generally avoid to answer this type of questions as my answer may be biased because I am the maintainer of the code of this extension, so if it were doing what you say I could easily answer “No, the plugin does not do that” and close the ticket.

I encourage you to go here [1] (which is the official repository of the plugin) and audit it by yourself, if you find something suspicious related to your questions then you can come back and report the issue pointing to a file and/or line of code; if you find nothing relevant there then we can assume that the root of the issue may be elsewhere. Alternatively, you can run the same tests over the htaccess file with the plugin uninstalled and see if the issue persists.

To answer your question (if you want to trust my word), the current code of the Sucuri plugin does not changes then permissions of any htaccess file. If you run a search for the command “chmod” against the code you will find two instances where the plugin sets the permission of self-contained datastore files to 0x644 and nothing else.

I will mark this as resolved, feel free to reopen if you want to continue the discussion and/or if you need more information regarding your previous or new questions.

[1] http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/sucuri-scanner/