Hello, one of my members had her account taken over by a troll who correctly guessed her password. He then changed the password and her email address in her profile.

But what I don't understand, he then deactivated the account. How could this happen? The account is an ordinary member's account not an administrator or a moderator account.

Many thanks.

I have no idea how this could have happened. Users cannot deactivate their own accounts. Only administrators can. It is possible that you or another admin have accidently deactivated when attepting to change her password.

Nevermind, that is not so important. Just make sure that this user can now soundly log in with her account and advise her to chose a harder-to-guess password.

Thanks for your reply.

I am the only admin on the forum and I knew nothing about this until i received an email informing me and I quote ......

Quote:

The account owned by .............. has been deactivated or newly created, you should check the details of this user (if required) and activate it using the following link:

So it wasn't until I received this email that I went into the member's profile to check if it had been deactivated and it had.

I then saw a post on the forum apparently made by this member, but I since found out that her account had been used by the troll who has been attacking my forum the past number of days.

I honestly don't know how he managed to deactivate the account and I certainly didn't do that! This is the bit that is really worrying me. If he can do that, what else can he do? All this takes place in the middle of the night when no-one is around to see who is on the forum.

There's no way surely that he can get into my admin account without the password? He certainly doesn't know it, no-one knows it apart from myself.

When someone changes his/her email the account gets de-activated - as you have the account activation on administrator, you got the email.

You can easily give her her old username (and the posts) back by going into your administration panel, then user management. There look up her username and change her email and password. Then send the password in an email to her and she can login again with that account (and the troll can't).

Yes, that was what I was trying to say.

You can "double check" this by creating a (fake) user yourself, activate it as administrator and then login as the fake user - change the email again. You'll see the account gets de-activated then.