One of my company’s servers is hosted with Liquid Web. Yesterday one of my co-workers tries to log into WHM and sees the following message:
Brute Force Protection
This account is currently locked out because a brute force attempt was detected. Please wait 10 minutes and try again. Attempting to login again will only increase this delay. If you frequently experience this problem, we recommend having your username changed to something less generic.
He tries to log in a bit later and receives the message again. He contacts Liquid Web’s Heroic Support, and the support person “helpfully” recommend a server reboot to fix the problem. My co-worker asked for another solution, and support said that it was the only way.
My co-worker tells me about the situation, and I tell him that the support guy is an idiot. It takes all of about ten seconds to quickly find a solution to the problem on google. I then tell my co-worker that I’ll fix the problem, so he “thanks” the support guy and closes the chat.
I logged into the box via SSH and had the problem fixed in a couple of minutes.