xguymc

I wasn’t able to find a solution in all my searching regarding this glitch, but I solved it on my WP install (v4.2.2).

My WP Dashboard also showed that I needed an update, but none of the plugins were listed when I went to the update area.

I even removed all of my plugins, but that actually made it worse telling me two plugins needed updating. This indicated the problem wasn’t in the plugin directory. I put my plugins back and reactivated and was back to the original issue.

I could guess which plugin was being referenced from the version number even though the name was blank.

I searched my database for references to that plugin (the version number might have worked as well) and found a curious entry under wp_options/_site_transient_update_plugins. The (too complicated to go into) data seemed to indicate that my plugin needed an update and had a reference to a zip file on my site (via an http address). In my case this was a zip file of a “premium” plugin that came with a theme that I assume the site designer purchased.

It seemed to me that if I somehow allowed it to update, then that might fix the erroneous update notification(s), and I had the zipped plugin in the location referenced in the DB(see above), so thought I would give it a try. I have no idea how WP knew that file was there, or what version of the plugin it contained.

So I put the plugin back into the folder via ftp then changed it’s version number in the “plugin_name.php” file in the plugin root folder to a slightly lower version in the two places with version numbers. I then activated the plugin and lo and behold it said an upgrade was available, I successfully “upgraded” using what I can only assume was the zip file on my site and I had no more false update notifications after that, including the Wordfence message.

Hopefully this will point anyone having a similar issue in the right direction. Best of luck.