We use an outside service to periodically scan our sites for vulnerabilities. Recently, we were advised that one of our WordPress multisite installations uses the default “admin” for the SuperAdmin username.

I actually knew about that, but, as anyone who manages WordPress sites knows, you can’t change your username once set. For a while, I didn’t worry about it, but this seemed to be the last little vulnerability I needed to address on the list, so I decided to tackle it.

Fortunately, I was able to find a solution by searching the web. Auroral is a blog in the UK, and they spell it out quite easily. You can view their solution, or, for expediency of time, here’s the solution:

1. Using phpMyAdmin, or whatever database tool you prefer (I use NaviCat), log into your database.
2. Find your [wp]_users table ([wp] would be whatever prefix you used when you set up your database).
3. Find the row in the table where admin is the value in the user_login column.
4. Change admin to whatever value you prefer. Your new name must not contain spaces.
5. Change the value in the user_nicename column to match the same value.
6. Commit these changes.
7. Find the [wp]_sitemeta table.
   
8. Find the row with site_admins for the meta-data value. You should see something that looks like this:

   a:1:{i:0;s:5:"admin";}

9. Change admin to your new administrator name — the same you entered in step 4, above.
10. Change the 5 to the count of characters in your new administrator name. For example, if your new user name is “cooldude,” then the count would be 8. Therefore, this value should read:

    a:1:{i:0;s:8:"cooldude";}

11. Commit this change.

Of course, test and re-test.

Bret Williams

Bret is the a co-founder and the Managing Partner of novusweb®. He is also author of several books on Magento and e-commerce and is sought as a speaker and trainer. Bret has been crafting internet innovations since 1995.