Quote From : landonpierce December 9, 2025, 7:33 am ... but Softaculous’ auto-login flow depends heavily on very short-lived usermeta and auth-related lookups that normally bypass persistent storage. Even though WordPress doesn’t persist nonces or auth tokens, Softaculous creates (and expects) fresh user session state at the moment the bypass link is clicked. If the object cache is persisting any part of the user’s last session especially get_user_meta(), cached capabilities, or the WP_User object it can cause WP Cerber to treat the Softaculous-issued cookies as “invalid” because the underlying user state doesn’t match what WordPress recomputes during a normal login.
OK, that is helpful. I can try a few things in the plugin.
Quote From : landonpierce December 9, 2025, 7:33 am In shared hosting, this becomes more visible because Softaculous and WordPress aren’t always running under the same PHP worker, so stale cache keys linger longer.
BOOM! If the object cache plugin has the APCu level-2 cache enabled this is certainly going to foul things up.
Quote From : landonpierce December 9, 2025, 7:33 am A possible fix on the plugin side would be to avoid caching usermeta and capability lookups during authentication requests. Checking for wp-login.php, wp-admin, or is_user_logged_in() during the login handshake only might be enough to force fresh reads on those keys without disabling caching globally. Not a perfect solution, but it narrows the issue to where Softaculous’ bypass actually fails.
I'll give this a try.
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