iThemes Tech Support – Free Version Potentially Overloading WP Engine Servers

Hello iThemes Support. My name is Darius and I am a Webmaster for Blue Corona.

Yesterday, I was testing your iThemes Security free product on several of our sites that hosted with WP Engine. At the same time, Sucuri was installed on one of the site, but was deactivated prior to installing iThemes. While everything seemed to function normally as I was going through the iThemes settings, I went to view the logs, but then an Error 522 issue occurred within the site. This also happened for multiple sites under the same WP Engine umbrella that was hosting. The outcome was the server overloading and needing to be restart by WP Engine support, which took nearly 30 minutes to resolve, Here is a snippet of the error logs when the crash occurred:

[Thu Oct 24 15:49:44.197639 2019] [php7:notice] [pid 3668] [client 24.199.198.234:44560] auditor:event=deactivated_plugin {“plugin”:”sucuri-scanner/sucuri.php”,”network_activation”:false,”blog_id”:1,”event”:”deactivated_plugin”,”current_user_id”:2,”remote_addr”:”24.199.198.234″}, referer: https://www.ba-hvac.com/wp-admin/plugins.php

Believing iThemes causing conflicts with Sucuri to be the issue, both were removed from the site as a precaution. However, to continue testing, I installed iThemes on a site not containing any previous security plugins that were installed. This seemingly looked as if the issue was resolved. However, later on today, when I was checking the brute force logs on said website, anotherissue occurred on the same WP Engine server, with the same sites crashing as well. This time, the resolution took five minutes, but instead of a server overload, it was phpMyAdmin crashing.

Can you please shed some light in regards to if iThemes Security free has/can cause server crashes? Is there anything that may be a direct trigger?