Account Security Improvements in WordPress 4.9

A few account security enhancements have gone into WordPress 4.9. The intention is to make it more difficult for an attacker to take over a user account or a site by changing the email address associated with the user or the site, and also to reduce the chance of a mistaken or erroneous change causing you to get locked out.

  • In order to change your user account email address, the site adminadmin (and super admin) email address, or the networknetwork (versus site, blog) admin email address on Multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site, a link now needs to be clicked in a confirmation email that gets sent to the new email address. This behaviour has existed for years on sites within a Multisite network — the functionality has now been ported to single site installations too. See #16470, #39118, and #39119.
  • The old site admin email address now gets notified of a change to the address (this includes the network admin email address on Multisite too). See #39117.
  • The email that’s sent to a user’s old email address when their email address is changed now includes the new email address. See #39112.

#4-9, #dev-notes