Claus D Jensen

Online Business, Music Production, Blogging, Success Strategies
...Online Business, Music Production, Blogging, Success Strategies
Written by Claus D Jensen on August 6th, 2009
Summary:

If you log in to your WordPress Blog as “admin”, you should change that. Out of security reasons! This post will tell you why, and how you change it.

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WordPress Security.

Do you log in as “admin” on your WordPress blog?

If you do log in to your WordPress Blog as ”admin”, you should change that!

I will tell you exactly how to do it in this blogpost, but first I will tell you why you should do it!

When you upload and start a WordPress blog, WordPress will, as default, name the administrator user account as “admin”.

A lot of WordPress users don’t change this, and keep the “admin” log in.

The problem with this is: there might be people out there wanting to gain access to your blog, and they would just need to keep using the “admin” user name with a bunch of passwords combinations. This is called brute force attack, and with automated tools it works quite often. They know, that many WordPress users log in as “admin”.

So I would highly recommend that you change this if you haven’t already done that! And – it’s very easy!

When you are logged in, go to the Dashboard>Users>Add New. Now you can add yourself as a new user. Give yourself a new username, and remember to make you Administrator!

IMPORTANT!!

As you choose your new user name, make sure that it is not similar to the name you display publicly on your blog, and you use to sign your posts!  If you sign your posts as My Name, for instance, naming the administrator user as “My” or “myname” wouldn’t help. Choose something that others won’t be able to guess easily!

Then log out, and log in with that new user and delete the old “admin” user. Don’t worry if you have many posts written as ”admin”, WordPress will ask whether you want to delete them or re-assign them to a new user (choose the latter obviously).

I hope you found this post helpful! icon biggrin WordPress Security: Do You Log In As Admin?

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20 Comments so far ↓

  1. Brian Brandt says:

    Glad that I could inspire you to be more aware of security issues with WordPress :-) .

    But you are correct, using the standard admin name, is just making it a bit easier for the hacker to hijack your blog.

  2. Great info Claus!

    Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.

    Trap

  3. Edward says:

    Great post claus!!!!

  4. Deb says:

    I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that. As much as I use WordPress, that’s great advice. :)

  5. Mr Idea says:

    Claus, thanks for the post. I knew the danger but was just never moved to do anything about it. I’m heading out to change the login for all of my blogs. Thanks again.

  6. pthommy says:

    thanks for info c jensen

    i am so new to wordpress, i hadn’t even gotten to the thought of security. thanks for bringing this up

    pt

    • Claus D Jensen says:

      Hi pthommy,

      I’m glad you found it useful.

      Even if you are new to WP you should change your log in.

  7. Sheila says:

    Thanks Clause….I will remind others too.

    Sheila

  8. Good idea, it´s now implemented on my blog!

  9. Ching Ya says:

    Claus,

    Informative tips. Always be cautious when it comes to protecting our content and login details. This will be very useful for WP new users for sure. Stumbled for more exposures, great effort!

    @wchingya
    Social/Blogging Tracker

  10. Walter says:

    Spammers are a real threat to our blogs. I’m glad you have shared one of your strategies. My I also suggest that you use WordPress Security plugin. :-)

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