How To Remove The WordPress Admin User Account

WordPress Secuirty - Delete Admin Account

If you’ve been on the internet in the past week or so, you’ve probably heard about the spate of “brute force” attacks that have been made on WordPress sites, specifically targeting accounts with the username “admin.” It has always been a security best practice to not use this username, or any other similarly generic one but the recent attacks have highlighted the issue to the masses, which is really the silver lining here.

The reason “admin” is the target is because it is the default username that is assigned upon installation of WordPress. If you install WordPress through your hosting control panel, you are usually, but not always, given a chance to change that before installation, but many unsuspecting folks, especially new users, may not see a reason to change it. So now a hacker has 50% of the information that he needs to get into your site. Since most people use extremely weak i.e. simple, passwords, hackers can automate the submission of zillions of attempts at guessing your password. If your password isn’t strong, they have a good chance of gaining access.

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GoDaddy WordPress Sites Getting Hacked

WordPress Sites on GoDaddy Being HackedIf you have a WordPress site on GoDaddy, keep a close eye on it. This week alone two different people have come to me with site issues that have turned out to be the same exact hack. There seems to be a spate of them going on – see this thread in the WordPress forums that I came across – this is the same hack that I found. Fortunately in the cases I’ve seen it hasn’t caused a ton of damage – more a nuisance than anything, but it indicates vulnerabilities in your site. GoDaddy of course will provide you with no help at all – they won’t even check if it’s a hack, they will just assume it’s some WordPress issue and not even give you a place to start trying to fix it. I’m not a security expert so I’m not sure if the timthumb vulnerability was the way in, but in both cases that vulnerability was present. In both cases I found code added to the functions.php file as well as a few other dodgy files showing up. 

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