Technical Tidbits™

Dear WordPress Spammer’s and Hacker’s,

You made a very STUPID mistake these past few days which allowed me to catch on to what you were doing!

First, you registered as a user on my roomie’s blog. That in and of itself wouldn’t have been something suspicious, except for the fact that he does not have the conventional registration link as I do on my blog! He purposely disabled it.

So, in order for you to have been able to register yourself, you would have had to gone through the backdoor, which only a technical user of WordPress would know, or a hacker! Nice one!

But you were busted because the roomie gets e-mailed automatically when someone registers and you didn’t register through the normal link on his site which was what made him suspicious and brought it to my attention.

That being said, you also made another stupid mistake.

You registered under the same name, and same e-mail address for my blog, and a number of my clients blogs – for which I also get e-mails when someone subscribes under the webmaster account for all my clients.

Imagine my surprise when I saw a MikeB***** being so interested in all our blogs and with probably a bogus Gmail address too! Such a diverse amount of interests you have my dear!

I am in the process of verifying the MikeB***** Gmail address and as of this writing, I’ve not received a return notice from Gmail that the user does not exist. However, I also haven’t received an email from the person to verify their first name as a legitimate user either! (Which is why I have not yet published the full name!)

WordPress users, if you have seen the Gmail address: Pulvillarrac@gmail.com in your subscribers, you may want to disable or ban the account.  This is the person who registered on my roomies blog through the back door.

@henninguhle on twitter, stated that this email address is a hacker! I am also in the process of getting his permission to publish his German blog post about this here in English.

Yes, I know, you didn’t know I was so talented! {{{BLUSH}}} The problem is, I also forgot about the time difference between the US and Germany! My bad!

Also, a word to the wise for all you WordPress users out there. Bill Mitchell and I discussed this twice in the BlogTalk radio shows, but you may have not had time to listen to them so here’s a “HEADS UP”.

If you are using a default login of “admin” as a user name in your blog, login and set up a new administrator account under a different name.  Anything but admin, ADMIN, Admin, Administrator, or anything resembling an admin account!

Make sure you create a password that does not include a word in the dictionary, and use a combination of upper and lowercase letters along with a number or 2 or 3 and an odd character like the $ sign or something. The longer the better.

Logout of you admin account and login to your new admin account. Then, switch the default admin account to a subscriber. And if you have an easy password, for that account, change it! And don’t use the one you are using for your new admin account under the new name. Make it different.

Consider yourself duly warned!