GS Design Just another developer blog

Recently i have had my blog hacked.
Somebody broke in and change the admin user account password and email adress. So this let me completely out. Well not quite, i could still get in by modifying the admin details directly in the database.

This incident made me search for more details about securing your wordpress blog. Although there are lot of ways to secure your wordpress Administration Panel like .htaccess blocking, using SSL or Banning Ips, most of them are a little complicated and require some little knowledge to implement. But during my search i came across a small tip that is going to make your administration panel a little harder to hack.

The Trick is changing the administrator username. The default installation name is admin, this make the hacker jobs more easy since the already know the username, they just need to guess the password. So by simple changing the username from the default admin to something different you will make the hacker job a little harder.

To do this you need to login into your PhpMyAdmin and browse to the table wp_users and edit the entry of your username and change username from admin to any other username ( make sure it is not already used by another user ). It is recomended that the username is not a dictionary name, since that will make it easier to break.

Hope this information helped you, and i await your comments.

Cheers

Recently i started to do some cleaning on my blog, and added and removed some plugins. At one point i starting getting the error:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time exceeded in /wp-includes/streams.php

At first i tought it has something to do with the plugins i just added, or the multi-language plugin ( wich i disabled later on, and moved my romanian posts to gabrielsolomon.ro ). So i started to do some googling and discovered it was not to do with the plugins but it was a bug in the version 2.5 of wordpress.
Which kind of made sense since i recently upgraded to it … and have not encountered this error before.

It seems it is caused by the WPLANG setting in the wordpress wp-config.php file.
So if you have setup the file like this :

// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to ‘de’
// to enable German language support.
define (‘WPLANG’, ‘ro’);

Then you need to remove the language like so :

define (‘WPLANG’, ”);

That seem to do the trick for me, and the error stop showing up.

Hope this article saved you some googling time and invite you to comment if you encountered a similar problem or have a better solution.