HTTP 500 error

Same – In my case the .htaccess file was corrupt, as the blacklist was truncated – a quick but unsatisfactory solution is replacing the file with an older (working) one by FTP

# BEGIN Ban Users
		# Begin HackRepair.com Blacklist
		RewriteEngine on
		RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Acunetix [NC,OR]
		<snip apx 36 correct lines>
		RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Grafula [NC,OR]
		RewriteCond %{HTTP_USE

There is a bug (actually 2) in the Ban Users “User Agents” part which prevents it from working properly when more than 1 banned “User Agent”
is specified …

Not really relevant I think but still something worth to be aware of.
When specifying multiple User Agents to be banned ALL RewriteCond lines in .htaccess end with [NC]
For example (Zeus and Apollo the User Agents to be banned) the following RewriteCond lines are added to .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Apollo [NC]
…

while it should be:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Apollo [NC]
…

Also EVERY time you save Settings (and you have previously enabled “Ban Users” and you have specified >1 User Agents to be banned) an empty line is added to the banned User Agents list.
This has currently no negative impact on the .htaccess, BUT when you fix the code for the first issue those empty lines will result into this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Apollo [NC,OR]
…

Which makes the .htaccess invalid and will break your website …

The empty (User Agents) lines by the way are added by iTSec php code.
When iTSec plugin reads the banned User Agents list from the database it adds a PHP_EOL to the list EVERY TIME …

So when you fix issue 1 you also need to fix issue 2. After that it works perfectly (as long as you don’t add an empty line to the User Agents list yourself …).

dwinden