They say that ignorance is bliss, and maybe that’s what made it a little easier dealing with stuff like this…
That’s a log of brute force attempts that have been made against my new server in the last couple of days – something I just didn’t have access to see on my old accounts, but now can through the dedicated server. And I guess it’s one of those things that for the most part you just have to accept as something that happens on the Internet … bots randomly scouring IP blocks in search of systems that have insecure passwords or open accounts. Like I said – I’m sure that just as many of these types of attacks hit my old servers as well and I just never knew it because I didn’t have the rights to see.
The only thing that bothers me is that I wish I could change the login for root to anything else that would be less of a given, but apparently in the particular configuration of software that is used on my new server, that’s the one account that cannot be changed. It’s something that I finally got around to doing to all of my WordPress installs once I figured out how easy it is to go into the tables and rename the admin account to a different username, but I guess I just would’ve thought that with the account that can literally control everything on the entire server, there would be a little extra protection built in!
At least the brute force protection that’s built in seems to function ok, though. It auto-bans IPs after a set number of misses, and my password is pretty solid, so hopefully that’s enough??? 😕