Malware scanner doesn’t work

Hi Patrick

Thanks so much for answering my call for help! It was very much appreciated ❤

I left the kinda-tecky stuff re your suggestion about the debug.log to my long-suffering husband but I did delete the Defender plugin yesterday and only re-installed it this afternoon.

Checked the malware scanner and again, no luck 😧 Same as before – little wheel spinning valiantly on the left and nothing happening 😕

I have a genealogical website (which I would hate to lose and Updraft doesn’t seem to be able to back up), and a website about ferrets, which is backed up by Updraft but which still isn’t able to do Defender’s malware scan!

Both are different themes and both worked fine with the Defender plugin until the 2nd but last update!

Thank you again for your very kind suggestions 😊

Cheers

Nona

Hi Kasia

My apologies for taking so long to answer but it was hard to pin down my husband as he has been out and about a lot!

He told me what to do to get the screenshot for you so I did it but I can’t see any way to upload the image to this forum 🤷‍♀️

Could you please let me know your email address so that I can send it to you that way?

Many thanks for your help 😊

Best wishes

Nona

Here you go

https://monosnap.com/file/49IK02ikrql1klABPFgVqQB2PWKUoj

Thanks 🙂

Here you go
https://monosnap.com/file/4Mvv8kFndnHrckTmgnSLqwSyWUKgZT

Hi Patrick

Many thanks for letting me know there is no console issue.

I’ve forwarded your instructions to my husband and will try and pin him down when he gets back home to call our hosting company. No doubt he’ll let you know the answer once he speaks to them.

Cheers

Nona

Hi Patrick

Philip finally got an email from our hosting company and I have copied and pasted it below. I hope it gives you some clues about the malware scanning!

Hello,

Thank you for contacting HostGator Support. My name is Kenneth and I had the pleasure of reviewing your case today. I apologize for the delay in our response time. We have been experiencing a higher than normal volume of requests.

I understand you contacted our support team about trouble with a 3rd party plugin for "pio-ulski.com". After reviewing your case, you contacted the support for this plugin, who advised you the issue could be with the server firewall or cURL trouble.

First, for shared hosting servers, HostGator does NOT whitelist access for IPs in the server firewall. This is due to you being in a shared environment, so whitelisting access would affect other users. However, HostGator does not generally block any specific IPs.

Second, for cURL, I can confirm cURL itself is working. However, I did see that when cURL-ing your specific domain, it was getting a 403 error (both from the server and from external locations). The code 403 mean permission denied or unauthorized. Again, HostGator does not block specific access, so most likely you have security settings you've put in place on your site specifically that is causing the cURL to be blocked.

Looking at your site, I see multiple security plugins installed that could be blocking the cURL request (based on user-agent most likely). Some plugins I see are "Wordfence Security", "All In One WP Security", and "Anti-Malware Security and Brute-Force Firewall". So, you may need to try disabling some of these plugins (or modifying settings in those plugins).

In addition to this, I also see various security rules and blocks setup in the htaccess file for the specific site. This is the file: /home1/kahlua/public_html/pio-ulski.com/.htaccess . Some of these rules are ones setup by the various security plugins you have installed. Though, I also see some IP deny rules are that denying your actual server IP as well (IP: 192.185.226.186) which is strange.

At this point, it could be that your malware scan from this 3rd party plugin is failing due to the cURL 403 error. However, this is not caused by the server firewall, but rather your specific security settings on the site. Since we did not setup this, we do not want to start modifying or disabling it to avoid any issues. I recommend that you review the configuration or seek assist reviewing it with a developer (or the providers of the plugins used).

If you have any questions or if anything was unclear, you can reply to this email for further assistance. For any other inquires, please contact our Live Support team at anytime. Our associates are available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Live Chat Support: https://chat.hostgator.com
Live Phone Support: (866)-964-2867

Warm regards,

Kenneth J.
Escalated Support