WordFence Blocking Updates – 403 Forbidden

  • Resolved Sonja London

    (@summit)


    5 years, 11 months ago

    Just got

    403 Forbidden
    A potentially unsafe operation has been detected in your request to this site, and has been blocked by Wordfence.
    If you are an administrator and you are certain this is a false positive, you can automatically whitelist this request and repeat the same action.

    While trying to do 6 plugin updates. I eventually ran them one at a time and they all worked.

    My problem is 2 fold:
    1) Can the message give us a hint about what the problem is?
    2) since the updates finished individually without further warning, are we safe or not???

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • wfalaa

    (@wfalaa)

    5 years, 11 months ago

    Hi Sonja,

    I’ve a question to ask here please, were you initiating these updates directly from WordPress Dashboard (selecting multiple plugins then choose “update” from the dropdown menu) or you were running one of the WordPress management plugins that can do multiple updates at once?

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter Sonja London

    (@summit)

    5 years, 11 months ago

    Directly. Selected 6 then hit the button.

    wfalaa

    (@wfalaa)

    5 years, 11 months ago

    Hi Sonja,

    I’ve discussed this issue with our team and the answer to your second question is “Yes” you are safe, sometimes when you update multiple plugins, one of the plugin names might match a firewall rule during this aggregated request.

    Switching the firewall into “Learning Mode” then running the multiple plugins update, should allow this request and whitelist it. After that you can revert the firewall status back to “Enabled and Protecting”.

    Thanks.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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