So, per a previous blog post on security, this is why you don’t use an obvious username. If you look at the number of emails in my inbox, there are 316. There were actually over 400. The night before, there were 18. Each email represents 4 attempts to force break one of the sites I host so that’s around 1600 attempts to guess the password.

The site in question has a math captcha, so this really shouldn’t be happening at all. I guess someone found a way to nullify the WordPress math captcha I paid $8 for: these things happen. On the other hand: basic security does the trick here. The username they are trying to hack is the wrong one. They are basing it off of the URL: the username they are trying is the URL…

Guess what, that’s not the actual user name! So even if they somehow stumbled across the right password, they would have to have the right username and, in this case:

1. It has nothing to do with the name of the site.

2. It’s not admin, administrator, webmaster, or any conventional user name.

So- they won’t be able to hack the site this way no matter how hard they try. To summarize, use basic security precautions: nonstandard username, strong password, and set profile so name of avatar on posts is not the same as the username. On a multi-user site, give each user only the access privileges they actually need and no more. Do these things, and all will be well even if people try to hack you (as they did here)

It was a pain to delete the 400 email notifications- but that’s part of the trade I guess, and why people get paid money to host! Other people anyway- the clients still haven’t paid. That’s ok though- I altered the site to reflect that and it makes me feel better!

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