Plugin Author
gioni
(@gioni)
Normally, there should be just one folder. It’s created automatically and used by the malware scanner as a quarantine and a temp folder. You might see multiple folders due to DB or disk related issues occurred earlier Aug 2018. You can delete all folders except the newest one.
Thread Starter
Josiah
(@colewebdev)
I found another WordPress site with 3400 of these directories. The date ranges on these stretched back to Jan 18th 2019, and there were a handful with today’s day (4/1/2019). Is there a setting I should check to prevent this? I’m worried about my other WordPress instances.
Plugin Author
gioni
(@gioni)
There is no setting. The plugin creates the folder automatically if it’s unable to get access to it. Do you run the website on a Windows hosting? Do you use a CDN plugin? Jetpack?
Thread Starter
Josiah
(@colewebdev)
Both websites are hosted at WPEngine. Do not use Jetpack. Do not use a CDN plugin.
I just checked another site we host at WPEngine at random, and found 7536 directories!
Clearly there’s something going on with WPE and this plugin/permissions.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by
Josiah.
Plugin Author
gioni
(@gioni)
It seems it’s caused by aggressive DB caching. Could you check a DB table for a row?
Plugin Author
gioni
(@gioni)
Hi! Have you sorted out the issue?
Thread Starter
Josiah
(@colewebdev)
Not really, I just haven’t had time to inspect more installs. I did notice that on the one site that had 7000+ directories, once I was done inspecting and updating and then actually running a scan, the directory creation stopped. I can’t nail it down to a specific action, but if I had to guess it was running the scan.
I can report back if I find more installs with this issue and maybe isolate the steps to stop the runaway dir creation.
Plugin Author
gioni
(@gioni)
Please check if some of those directories contain the .htaccess file. If no file in there, that means the plugin was unable to write into a directory and so it tried to create another one.
Thread Starter
Josiah
(@colewebdev)
Looks like that’s the case. The site in question had 3 directories left, the newest contained the htaccess file, while the older two did not.
WPEngine has a “reset permissions” feature, I wonder if that would solve it: https://wpengine.com/support/file-permissions/
We’re having the same issue. It only happens on websites hosted on WP Engine. 6000+ wp-cerber-[random hash] folders. Tried changing permissions on most recent folder but nothing seems to work. Is there any way to disable the automatic malware scan? We don’t need this and having 6000+ empty folders in the uploads folder is no good.
Thanks!
Thread Starter
Josiah
(@colewebdev)
FYI I would try running the malware scan at least once. I found that it will sometimes stop the runaway directory creation.
@colewebdev / @harlointeractive – I work for WPE. If you all would like us to help troubleshoot this, please feel free to log into your WP Engine portal and open up a support chat.
@gioni – If there appears to be a platform compatibility issue with WP Engine and your plugin, please email wptech -a-t- wpengine -d-o-t- com and we can see what we can do to help 🙂
Nice, looks like that did fix the issue Josiah. Thank you!
Thread Starter
Josiah
(@colewebdev)
Just found another install on WPEngine with 14,858 directories dated back to 11/9/2018. About 30 are created each day. It would be good to have this issue resolved with the plugin itself, as opposed to “fixing” each install by running the integrity/malware scan.
