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I am not sure what "URL shield" is supposed to mean. Regarding the notifications about attacks, you have to be aware of some important changes:
- The .htaccess Maker now includes a whole lot of malicious users agents which are being blocked from accessing your site BEFORE Joomla! loads, therefore before Admin Tools is triggered. This has the very positive side-effect of dropping the number of attacks hitting Admin Tools' system plugin by a whooping 90%.
- You can now select which security exceptions result in emails being sent and which are being logged. Under the Logging and Reporting tab you will find the options "Do not log these reasons" and "Do not send email notifications for these reasons". By default we only include "Geo Block" which is consistent with what Admin Tools has always been doing. If you have modified them (please DO CHECK, do not simply trust your memory that you didn't touch them) then yes, Admin Tools will not report and / or log what you told it to not report and / or log. Anything else would be a bug.
- Finally, just because you used to get a lot of security exceptions doesn't mean that you'll always be getting a lot of security exceptions. Script kiddies tend to lose interest to your site after a while, especially if they've tried all they got and still couldn't get past your site's defenses.

There is an easy way to test DFIShield. Let's say your site's domain is www.example.com. Try to access the following URL with your browser:

http://www.example.com/index.php?dummy=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akeeba/fof/development/fof/autoloader/component.php

This will trigger DFIShield. The DFIShield protection is triggered every time there is a query parameter holding a URL to something that looks like PHP code. It doesn't matter if it's benign (like the file I am giving you) or a malicious one. If it contains PHP code it triggers DFIShield.

Please check your WAF Configuration. DFIShield must be disabled. If this doesn't help please try reinstalling the component (without uninstalling it!) and make sure the System - Admin Tools plugin is published and its order is set to make it the first plugin to be loaded.

Are you absolutely and perfectly sure you have PHP 5.4 actually activated on your site? Please do check by going to your site's back-end and clicking on System, System Information. Click on the PHP Information tab. You will see something with really big letters on top, e.g. "PHP Version X.Y.Z". Can you please copy it here? I have the growing suspicion that you are using an old and unsupported version of PHP...

Thank you VERY MUCH for the detailed information. I could now reproduce the issue. A new release is on the way. It will be published within a few minutes.

They are unrelated. Please post a new ticket to the correct category.