Your website’s security features could accidently block you from accessing your own website because they assume you’re up to no good.

There are a couple reasons why this assumption might happen.

1. Incorrect password attempts

If someone at your Office has made too many incorrect password attempts rather than resetting their forgotten password that may have automatically triggered a block by Wordpress to protect itself from a perceived threat. Every day websites everywhere are silently hit by what are called brute force attacks. These are computers trying to guess passwords for website usernames they've detected.

This is very common. About 30% of the traffic on the internet is malicious bots. 

If you don't know your password, reset it from the login screen or you may end up locking the entire office out.

Example: 

  • If I (while sitting in your office IP of 12.34.56.789) tried to log in unsuccessfully with an incorrect password, 3 times, within a 5 minute period, then the website would temporarily block my IP address. 
  • After 7 times of temporarily blocking the IP, it would become a permanent ban. My IP is shared by everyone else in the office though. So suddenly everyone else is blocked too. 
  • The rest of the world sees the website fine because they're on their own IP addresses.

Solutions:

  • Band-aid solution

    Skunkworks will need to remove your IP address that you provide from the block list in the security plugin and then whitelist it to prevent it from being blocked again.

  • Better solution

    You may want to contact your I.T. provider to provide a password management system for staff that frequently forget their passwords. 

2. Outlook email issue

If your IP address was making too many attempts to reach a non-existant URL

eg: [yourdomain.com] /autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

Solutions: