Webgazette.co.uk

Towards the end of April I got an WordPress email telling me that my blog had been setup, giving me a login and password. Nothing unusual about that you may think - WordPress always sends an email when you set it up giving you an initial password to login with.

…and there isn’t anything unusual. …but there is if you realise that it wasn’t my blog and that somebody had set up their blog using my email! I had just about forgot about the email, but was tidying my inbox when I came across it again. Out of curiosity I visited the blog and find that it is a thriving, multiuser blog dedicated to an online virtual fantasy community. The whole thing looks very professional as if these people are a serious corporation running this thing as a serious businness.

I’m afraid curiosity got the better of me and soon I was logged in! Can you believe that they had never changed the original administrator password. At this point I realised that I had to do the decent thing and tell them about it, so I went to the user page to find an email address to contact. There were about 15 users set up but I found an email for a person set up as the Editor and sent them an email telling them about their mistake.

I’ve not had a reply yet. Maybe I won’t, but they sure ought to be grateful that it was me that had got full administrator access rights to their site and not some destructive hacker.

I wonder how long before they put their mistake right?

[added 24th May 2008]
Well all is fixed now, but it took ages and wasn’t fully secured until around 20:00 GMT+1 on the 23rd May despite claims that it was by the company that runs the site for them. Unbelievable. If that was my money paying for that, I think I’d be looking for a new webmaster now!

It’s hard to imagine what would lead them to use an email address that they must have known wasn’t there’s to use.

If I wasn’t honest and was really evil, I could have created some nasty surprises for them. I wonder how long it would take to realise somebody was altering their posts or adding links? Haha.

Just imagine the fun I could have had! I think it almost worth a reward

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under General, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.