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This would seems to prevent attackers who know that a 'root' user exists?

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Exactly would you imagine to gain from that, in relation to having a solid root password? – andol Jun 7 '10 at 4:52
Because having to guess a username and password is twice as hard at just guessing the password? – PoppySeeds Jun 7 '10 at 5:10
No, because the username isn't meant to be a secret, hence the system will put much less efforts into hiding/protecting it. If you want to increase the amounts of possible combination you will get a much better effect by simply making your password longer. – andol Jun 12 '10 at 19:39
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Don't remove the MySQL 'root' user, just rename it instead:

mysql> update user set user="somecrazyname" where user="root";
mysql> flush privileges;

I can't rightly imagine what will happen if you go deleting the root user.

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It wouldn't make any difference for MySQL if you removed the initial 'root' user but you wouldn't be able to create any more databases/tables etc. if your other users don't have the right privileges. – joschi Jun 7 '10 at 7:41
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