One of my oldest WP blogs got hacked – yeah – I know – why do they do that?

I had kept everything nicely up-to-date, but as it was such an old blog, the password I had chosen when I set up the MySQL database for it initially, was – admittedly – cute, but not particularly secure.

So, I went to Ms. Google to find out how to change the password of my WP Database – but without luck. There were plenty of tutorials on how the change the password of a WP user – but that is easy, no need for a tutorial there.

Learned quite a bit when I ran into some instructions on how to do this with the command line mysql command (you have to start the mysql service first), but still ran into a problem updating the password. But with the information from that post I finally managed to do it from phpMyAdmin.

Here we go:

1. Log into phyMyAdmin as the root user
2. Go to the mysql database (yes, the database is a user of mysql)
3. Find the table user (I first could not find it but had to open views – and then it appeared)
4. Find the user with the name of your database user you chose when you set up it up. That’s the DB_USER parameter in your wp-config.php.
5. Click on that user and a new screen opens
   Edit privileges: User account ‘yourdb_wp’@’localhost’
6. And there you finally find the button ‘Change password’ at the top of the screen.