When trying to login to wp-admin I was faced by an unfamiliar white screen of death with the message “Not Acceptable” and the error code 403.
I did a bit of searching around and couldn’t find the answer that solved the problem for me. I did see a few posts about bot attacks but they didn’t say how to fix the problem.
The Problem
Turns out my site was being attacked by a bunch of bots trying to brute force Wp-Admin. I have WordFence installed, which I am assuming added the following to my root directory .htaccess file:
# wp-login.php was being attacked by bots, this was added to keep your website online
<Files ~ “^wp-login.php”>
Order allow, deny
Deny from all
Satisfy All
</Files>
ErrorDocument 403 “Not acceptable”
The Solution
Just remove that section from your .htaccess file or allow for your IP. I decided to change it slightly so it only allows access from my IP.
Order deny, allow
Deny from all
Allow from [This Is Where You Put Your IP]
This seems to work nicely for me. Let know if it works for you in the comments below.
My solution is, let your host provider know, they’ll ask for your IP address, they will clear this address and all is well again.