Passwordless MySQL root account in shared hosting
Posted on 18 Aug, 2008, categorized under Information Insemination
I was doing some work with many terminals open, and in one terminal I typed the following to access my MySQL databases;
$ mysql -u root
and I’ve been granted access, as I don’t set any password for my local MySQL account. I was somehow surprised however when I run the following command
mysql> show databases;
as I’ve been presented with many databases, maybe hundreds of them, and with that I realize something is not right somewhere. Upon checking, I found out that I was accessing the wrong server, and to my surprise again, it’s in my shared webhosting’s server.
When thinking creating rogue PHP scripts will let you do what your jailshell won’t let you do, this incident make me want to have a co-located server even more. I guess it’s a bad idea now to have all my shells to look the same when working with multiple terminals.



