If you’re seeing a Wordfence notice about a suspected malware URL in Rank Math, as shown in the screenshot below, we want to assure you that it is a false positive, and you need not worry about it.
Several users have reported that Wordfence has triggered this warning after installing Rank Math to the latest version 1.0.216.
The file update-1.0.42.php mentioned in the warning is an update routine file. It contains code to remove any erroneous redirections when the user updates to v1.0.42 (which was released 4 years ago). The recent update (v1.0.216) improved the code in this file according to WordPress Coding Standards, and Wordfence is incorrectly triggering a warning after this update.
Note: We’ve released a quick fix to this issue in our latest beta update and will roll it out in our upcoming stable update.
To update Rank Math to the latest beta, head over to Rank Math SEO → Status and Tools → Version Control. Here, you can find the option to opt-in for beta updates. Enable the beta tester option and save your changes.
The latest beta update for Rank Math will now be available when you navigate to the Plugins section in your WordPress dashboard. From here, you can update Rank Math to the latest beta as shown in the screenshot below.
Once done, you should no longer see this warning from Wordfence.
And, that’s it! We hope these steps helped you resolve this issue on your site. If you’re still facing trouble, please feel free to open a support ticket here, and our support team would be more than happy to assist you.