ERROR: Invalid username. Lost your password?

  • hey all, I usually find a solution scouring the posts already here but haven’t been able to fix this. So sorry if it seems an issue well over posted but the many I saw the solutions haven’t worked.

    I try to login and it gives me this message:

    ERROR: Invalid username. Lost your password?

    OK, what i’ve done to try fix.

    I have renamed the username and I have reset the password through phpmyadmin using the MD5 security from the drop down.

    No Fix

    I have renamed my current theme for it to default to the standard as I recently changed my theme but the blog works fine with it and you can browse it, just cant log in.

    No fix

    I have in addition renamed the plugins folder and put a dummy empty folder called plugins in its place in case a plugin was causing prob.

    No fix

    I cleared my browsers cache (chrome, FF, IE) Just says the same error, plus cookies are not enabled, they are btw.

    No fix

    I uploaded a new wp-login.php

    No fix

    I checked the site url in wp-options in the database. Correct

    No fix

    Really cannot find any other solutions and I still cant login. Now I know you might say just re-install it but i’ve had it up for 4-5 years now and there are so many posts, and styling I’ve done. I have a plugin backing it up but, my blog loads you can visit it fine https://visualisationmagazine.com/blogvisualthinkmap, I just can’t login.

    I’m asking my host for help, but thought I’d post here to see if I am missing something.

    Please help

Viewing 16 replies (of 16 total)

  • Brilliant, Jim – very grateful. So found my wp-config.php file and found that someone (they left a calling card, I won’t credit them with their name!) had got in and changed the dbase name AND password. Once I got in, I used phpmyadmin, found the wp_users file and changed the notification email back to mine. I then went to my main “sitename”/wp-admin login page and asked for a password reset. I got email immediately and I am back in. Now I will carefully go through and change all usernames and passwords of everything I can think of to try and get control back.

    Background – I already had long, randomly generated password strings on both the ISP cpanel logins (I use hostpapa – are they vulnerable?), and on wordpress. Does anyone know how these hackers do it? Is it back to the basics of regular password refreshes?

    Jim – thanks again!

Viewing 16 replies (of 16 total)
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