'Authentication Required' popups spoiling my day

  • Resolved sahelsteve

    (@sahelsteve)


    12 years, 8 months ago

    Hi all.

    My blog runs on WordPress 3.2.1, Manifest theme by Jim Barraud, hosted on Netfirms.

    My URL is http://www.voiceinthedesert.org.uk/weblog/
    As you can see, every page on my site has a popup box ‘Authorization Required’ message. Chrome’s message says the following:

    The server http://www.voiceinthedesert.org.uk:80 requires a username and password. The server says: Password Protected.

    I don’t want these popups and I don’t know what is causing them.

    Interestingly, the popup only appears AFTER a page has fully loaded, and it goes away again as soon as you click ‘cancel’.

    I searched the forums and other users experienced this after having their sites hacked. Most of them solved the problem by installing a clean version of vars.php. But I checked my vars file and its absolutely clean – no strange encrypted code there at all.

    Shortly before my problems started I was doing two things.
    1. Installing, experimenting with and finally deleting the plugin XPanded Author Bio.
    2. Responding to prompts by W3TotalCache to update various parts of its programme. I chose ‘auto-install’ on all of these.

    In an effort to solve the problem I removed .htaccess from the voiceinthedesert/weblog folder. I suspect this was rash. I put it back quickly where I found it. Neither removing it nor replacing it had any effect on the popup problem.

    I’m not new to WordPress but neither am I an expert. This problem is totally beyond me. I really hope someone can help me.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter sahelsteve

    (@sahelsteve)

    12 years, 8 months ago

    This has now been resolved.

    I found this code in the footer:

    <iframe src="http://www.voiceinthedesert.org.uk/blog/wp-mail.php" name="mailiframe" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title=""></iframe>

    That is from another (password-protected) blog of mine. The two blogs use the same theme – I must have uploaded a footer from the wrong blog.

    I hope no one spent time on this.

    Steve

    http://www.voiceinthedesert.org.uk

    Frederick Townes

    (@fredericktownes)

    12 years, 7 months ago

    It sounds like there was a compromise of your site/server. Please mark this issue as resolved and note the actual remedy should anyone come across this topic.

    Thread Starter sahelsteve

    (@sahelsteve)

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Thanks, Frederick. I have now marked the issue resolved.

    I have three wordpress blogs, all running the Manifest theme. I was editing footer.php online and I got it all messed up, so I overwrote it by uploading the original footer.php by FTP.

    Except it wasn’t the original footer. It was a footer I had already tweaked for one of my other blogs – a footer containing an iframe object with a link to a file in a passworded blog. So every time my non-passworded blog tried to load footer.php, it would ask me for a password.

    Lesson learned: take care when overwriting files.

    Frederick Townes

    (@fredericktownes)

    11 years, 8 months ago

    Thanks for the explanation. You might consider using source control management on your site.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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