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.