Warning: Hackers

Today I  feel the urgent need for a very brief second blog post. And it is a warning. We have all heard about hackers, trying to make our lives miserable if for no other reason than just because they can. Well, so far I have been lucky enough to have not been targeted. After all, this is just a very small blog with relatively few followers. But apparently today I have become a target. Since this afternoon I have been getting emails from my wordpress plugin that there have been x amount of failed login attempts to my site and the ip address xyz has been blocked.

Why am I a target all of a sudden? When I got home from work I asked google. What happens is that hackers are trying to find a back door into the powerful wordpress servers. Those mega computers that are storing, hosting all of our blogs, for some of us, livelihoods. Since they cannot hack into them directly, hackers are trying the back door. Through ‘little’ wordpress blogs like yours and mine they want to get access to that power.

Since exactly 2:57 pm this afternoon until now, 7:42 pm I have received 523 emails about said failed login attempts. All these login attempts tried to log in either under ‘admin’, ‘administrator’ or ‘root’. Pretty obviously none of these is the user name for my admin account, because otherwise I would not be able to type this post right now. And why isn’t it ‘admin’? Because I am happy to say that I changed it not too long ago to something not so easy.

‘Admin’ is the standard user name for the administrator of any wordpress blog. And really the very first thing  you should do when you start a wordpress account and blog is – change it! There are quite a few articles on the internet lending a hand on how to do this and also why you should do it. And even if your blog is not new – change it now. Just do a google search for ‘wordpress hack attack’ or ‘wordpress botnet’ and see what you will find.

I for one am very, very glad I did it. It was a little bit of a pain, but well worth it. I still have this uneasy feeling ‘what if they hack my site’, but if I hadn’t changed the user and password, I am almost certain by now I would have been hacked and not been able to write this post of warning. I hope that my security will continue to hold.

But you – if you haven’t done so already, go and change your administrator user. Now. Immediately! No blog is too small to be a target for hackers!

 

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