I’ve spent the weekend fixing sites that have had all the WordPress usernames changed to admin.
This looks like it affected all sites hosted on one of my hosts.
Difficulties is, if there is more than 1 user with the username “admin” then you cannot login to WordPress or change the password and login because the system seems unable to compare the username and passwords correctly.
Solution
You can either restore a backup from prior to the change or my preferred solution is to go into the cPanel and then phpMyAdmin and open the WordPress database, find the wp_users table and edit the user directly.
You can either reset each user here or reset 1 and then login to WordPress to manage the rest.
Prevention
I’d recommend installing the free version of Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan, I find it works a treat.
Hi Grant!
I’m having similar problems but they seem to be repeating ~daily. So did your problem go away by just resetting once or did it occur again? And if it did, how did you manage to stop it from happening again?
Only ever happened once to me. I’ve got Wordfence installed on every site I manage. You might also find is a hosting issue. The issue is actually with your server, not your specific setup.
Thanks for your quick reply,
I’ll need to check this out with my hosting provider then, only time ever to have happened to me and it’s a really frustrating problem since it “locks everybody out” until I use password recovery for the first of the admin accounts and create the other accounts again. Weird.
And definitely not a cool thing on an eCommerce site with lots of updating happening constantly on them products etc.
Hi I am getting this same problem. Is there any guide to fix this. Restoring from a backup doesn’t help. It replicated again and all my usernames changed to “Admin”. hacked or database corruption? How do I fix this?
Hi Ray, I fixed it once and have not had the issue since. I wonder if the people that have it happen multiple times have a hosting issue.
Do you use Wordfence or a similar security plugin?
Can anyone shed some light on what the server/host issues were that caused this problem? I’m having the exact same thing happen on three sites, and host says they don’t see anything amiss, nor have they received any other complaints. I recreated admin accounts on one site, and within 3 hours they had all reverted back to username admin.
This keeps happening on one of my sites and it’s driving me bonkers!