How to recover wordpress access

Once uppon a time I had forgotten a password to one of my wordpress login. I need it because I need to update wordpress in case I had interesting read about new Critical Log4Shell (Apache Log4j) Zero-Day Attack. After no luck searching in lastpass records and keep cards I decided to go next step of difficulity. Also, level up or remember some of my devops oldtimes.

So I managed a simple steps to recover access:

• Connect to VPS by ssh and get access to SQL server.
• Backup sql server data.
• Gett hash of password I know from other wordpress directly from sql database.
• Update hash of lost password with known one. That's it.

First of all, I got access to VPS server.

Connecting to server… or servers.

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Connecting to VPS by ssh:

sudo ssh -l noone molokov.de

Now I need to backup database. It's URGENT!

sudo mysqldump -u dbuser -p --all-databases > dumpsql.sql

Connecting to sql server with username and password:

mysql -u dbuser -p

Success! Now let’s see what is inside the sql server:

SHOW DATABASES;

Good news everyone! There is some databases. Actually, there are more than 3. Maybe there are some old one’s from previous RIP projects. I guess, the database named MYBLOG03 is where known encoded password can be got. Probably from user table in column like user_passwd. Let’s see:

Selecting the database:

USE MYBLOG03;

Listing tables in it:

SHOW TABLES;

Output:

Database changed
MariaDB [MYBLOG03]> show tables;
+-------------------------+
| Tables_in_devpress      |
+-------------------------+
| wp_commentmeta        |
| wp_comments           |
| wp_links              |
| wp_options            |
| wp_postmeta           |
| wp_posts              |
| wp_term_relationships |
| wp_term_taxonomy      |
| wp_termmeta           |
| wp_terms              |
| wp_usermeta           |
| wp_users              |
+-------------------------+
12 rows in set (0.000 sec)

Hurragh! There are some tables. The last one might be table with records about registered users.

Let’s look inside its data:

select * from wp_users;

Nice! There is only one user with an encoded password in user_pass column. Copied!

Now getting access to database LSTPWDB01 the same way as before:

USE LSTPWDB01;
SHOW TABLES;
SELECT * FROM wp_users;

Brilliant, the database and the table structure are equivalent.

Finaly, updating a password:

UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass=SnVzdCBhbm90aGVyIFdvcmRQcmVzcyBzaXRl WHERE user_name=admin 

Signing in wordpress with know password…. success! There are some kind of unknown magician or shadow of sourceror near here!

• Wordpress
• SQL
• Terminal