Support

You don't have to do anything. Admin Tools blocked that suspicious request. That's all that was required to be done.

Netzy,

As you see, the defaults are pretty stark. It's up to you to create the kind of whitelists which are fit to your site. For some people, allowing GoogleBot would be a mistake, especially if GoogleBot had cached URLs which were repeatedly used by hackers to compromise my user's site and my user wants to block GoogleBot until he fixes his/her site.

Here's what I think about defaults. A locked door can keep the burglars out, but can also trap people in a burning building. I should not decide if the door in your building should be locked. I should only provide you with the lock and the key and let you decide if you want to lock it or not.

If the IP belongs to GoogleBot, the request comes from GoogleBot. However, what does the request mean? GoogleBot has no idea. If I were a clever hacker and found an exploit to your site, I could create a sitemap to my site which contains a link to your site. Only that the link to your site is actually a URL which is supposed to hack (or at the very least cause unexpected behaviour) on your site. GoogleBot picks it up and tries to access it. As a result, my hacking attempt does not originate from me, but from GoogleBot. If you add GoogleBot's IP to the "Never block these IPs" whitelist, then Admin Tools' protection won't be applicable to the requests coming from GoogleBot. If you have a vulnerable extension on your site and a clever hacker uses the aforementioned trick, your site will be hacked despite having Admin Tools installed and properly configured.

The correct solution is to see why GoogleBot is being blocked and add some .htaccess code to redirect these suspicious URLs to a 404 error page. This will cause the GoogleBot to not be blocked (the 404 will occur before Admin Tools has a chance to execute) and it will also tell GoogleBot to not visit that URL again (after it sees a 404 a few times, it will consider it a broken link and remove it from its list of URLs to look up).