Customer's can't logon - "Security error when trying to logon" message

[bpais]

We have been running v139h for about 2 years with no problems. All of a sudden NO customers can logon to our site. They get the message "There was a security error when trying to logon". (I have an test account and can not login to that...)
We can access the admin side and everything looks fine. All of the files in the includes\modules\pages\login are all original files and do not appear to be modified.

We restored our backup database going back a month and still can not login as a customer so the database appears to be fine. I searched this forum but could not find a solution.

What happened and how can we fix it??? Thanks in advance...

Bob
http://www.scrubadub.com/cart/

[RodG]

We have been running v139h for about 2 years with no problems.

Not possible. V1.3.9 has only been avaialable for about a year, and v.1.3.9h about 5 or 6 months.

All of a sudden NO customers can logon to our site. They get the message "There was a security error when trying to logon". (I have an test account and can not login to that...)
We can access the admin side and everything looks fine.

Q. Are you using SSL for both the admin and the customer logins?

I'm thinking this could be SSL related.

All of the files in the includes\modules\pages\login are all original files and do not appear to be modified.

How did you test/check?

We restored our backup database going back a month and still can not login as a customer so the database appears to be fine.

You could've also tried creating a new customer account to see if that will let you login (it doesn't), but this would also have implied that your database was OK and didn't need to be restored.

What happened

We have no way of knowing.

and how can we fix it???

The fix will depend on the cause (obviously), and we can only guess.

My 1st concern is that if you really have been running the same installation 'for about 2 years' then you aqre almost certianly running V1.3.8 and not the 1.3.9h that you stated, so my 1st thought is, you've been hacked.

If this is not the case, perhaps your host has just upgraded to PHP5.3 which has known issues with zen138.

There's not too many other things that would cause sudden failure with no known cause.

My suggestion to faultfind would be to first disable SSL (to see if it is related), then check your cache files and SESSION data settings. I'm pretty confident that the issue is going to be somehow related to one of these two things. This is little more than an educated guess though.

Cheers
Rod

[bpais]

I stand corrected... We upgraded from v1.38 to v1.39h in April of 2011. (11 moths ago...) We have been using zencart since 2007.

I appears the issue is related to the SSL. I disabled (set it from 'true' to false in the configure.php and in the admin configre.php. Then customers were able to login to the non SSL site.

What does this mean? We are using a shared SSL from our hosting site. Does this mean the Hosting site changed somthing? What could it be?

Thanks for your help?