Exclusive report by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

One of the most popular plugins for websites which run WordPress code, as does FromRome.Info, is the plugin, Wordfence, which defends them from malicious attacks.

I have used this plugin for nearly 10 years and know it well. And lately I have found that it is failing to defend against the new AI generation of hackers an bots.

WordPress.org is a website which features information about their software to run websites and has public forms for users to comment about these plugins. You can post a review and explain what problems you found using it.

It is supposed to be public and transparent and your free speech rights are supposed to be guaranteed.

But they are not.

And I found out just minutes ago, with the nastsy reply WordPress moderated posted to me after erasing my 3 star review of the Wordfence Plugin.

My review was something to this effect:

Wordfence is falling being AI Bots

I am concerned that Wordfence which I have been using for nearly a decade is falling behind the new generation of AI Bots. Before this I would have always given this plugin a 1000% approval rating, but now I am giving it 3 out of 5 stars, because I noticed an issue with the FireWall included in this plugin.

This Firewall has become incapable of blocking user agent with the *GoogleOther* label in their descriptor. Thee agents are using googlebot.com which is whitelisted in WordFence defaults, so it cannot be blocked. That was good in the past becauses googlebot indexes websites and if you want your website to be found on google you don’t want to block googlebot.com. However, Wordfence’s live traffic is showing human agents using the IPs of googlebot.com and running a user agent descriptor containing *GoogleOther*. And these cannot be blocked unless you allow all googlebots to be subject to rate limiting rules, which is certainly NOT beneficial to website promoters.

I have spoken with Wordfence support and they have not told me how to solve this problem nor did they show any interest in protecting their paid customers from this new evolving threat.

Also, after I removed googlebot.com from whitelisting and blocked all *GoogleOther* agents, I got very similar traffic from CCP controlled China, which makes concerns about this security risk even higher if nefarious agents are using back doors inside of Google’s platform(s).

Just hours after this, the Moderator at WordPress, send me this email and erased my entire review:

Message ID	<5cqD0r6bCtNrvkUec8Nd4ae0cBhOpnjpe64ArRvR5Y@wordpress.org>
Created at:	Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 12:29 PM (Delivered after 2 seconds)
From:	“WordPress.org Forums” <noreply@wordpress.org> Using PHPMailer 7.0.0 (https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)
To:	xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxx.xxx
Subject:	[Wordfence Security – Firewall, Malware Scan, and Login Security] Wordfence is falling behind AI bots

Support Moderator wrote:

Please do not use a review to leverage a result again. Your review has been removed.

Post Link: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordfence-is-falling-behing-ai-bots/?view=all#post-18721947

Convenient decision if you want keep all Wordfence users prone to attacks from China, isn’t it?

As for the accusation, it is completely false. However, no one will ever know, since contrary to all sense of transparency, my review was removed. This occurred after Wordfence read my review. And for this reason, for the sake of record, I publish this article now to warn Wordfence users everywhere.

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