Staying Calm When the Scary Security Email Lands

Staying Calm When the Scary Security Email Lands

Every so often, an email drops into your inbox with a subject line designed to raise your blood pressure:

Bug Report – Denial of Service (Script-Loader)

It looks technical. It sounds serious. And it arrives without warning.

This post is about what not panicking looks like in practice, and how calm, methodical action almost always beats fear-driven reactions.

The first instinct: “Something is wrong”

That instinct is human, and it isn’t stupid. Security emails trade on urgency because urgency bypasses judgement.

But urgency is also your cue to slow down.

The most important thing we did when this email arrived was nothing:

• We didn’t click links
• We didn’t download attachments
• We didn’t reply

Silence buys you time. Time gives you clarity.

Step one: reality-check the claim

A genuine security report will usually include specifics:

• Your exact domain
• File paths
• Timestamps
• Clear technical detail

This email didn’t.

Vague language and scary terminology are classic spam tactics. That doesn’t mean you ignore the email, it means you verify independently.

Step two: look at your system, not their story

Instead of engaging with the email, we went straight to the source of truth: the server.

We checked the WordPress error log.

What we found looked scary at first glance:

PHP Fatal error: Undefined constant “ABSPATH”

But context matters.

The error appeared:

• Only a handful of times
• Spread over several weeks
• With no performance issues
• With no traffic spikes

This wasn’t an attack. It was background bot noise, automated probes hitting a WordPress file directly and being rejected.

No denial of service. No breach. No emergency.

Step three: fix the real problem

Even when an email is spam, it can still point you toward housekeeping worth doing.

In this case, we:

• Cleaned up old plugins and themes
• Updated WordPress core
• Tightened file permissions
• Added a simple server-level rule to block direct access to a core file
• Tidied the .htaccess so it was clear, minimal, and correct

None of this was rushed. None of it was dramatic.

It was just maintenance.

Step four: test, confirm, move on

After the changes:

• The site loaded normally
• Permalinks worked
• Error logs went quiet

At that point, the issue was resolved, regardless of what the original email claimed.

That’s an important lesson:

You don’t resolve spam emails by replying to them. You resolve them by making sure your own systems are in order.

The bigger lesson

Security work isn’t about reacting to every alert. It’s about building the habit of:

• Staying calm
• Verifying independently
• Acting proportionately
• Fixing what’s actually under your control

Most scary emails are noise.
Some point to minor issues.
Very few are genuine emergencies.

Panic is expensive. Calm is efficient.

Final thought

If you take one thing away from this:

Never let someone else’s urgency dictate your response.

Slow down. Check your logs. Fix what’s real. Ignore the rest.

That mindset will save you time, money, and a lot of unnecessary stress.