MySQL brute force attack

MySQL brute force attack References I need to know more about MySQL brute force attacks. I see MySQL brute force attacks on our Linux server, however none of the machines are compromised yet. From this link, I figured out if am getting the garbage characters, while using telnet command from another remote machine, it means port 3306 is open to the outside world. I figured out from this link that if I modify /etc/my.cnf to include skip-networking, it will block all the outside connections to the port 3306. My question is, I have a program running which connects to the MySQL server (in which I am getting the brute force attacks) using a certain username and password (The username is not root). If I include the above line (skip-networking) in my.cnf file, will it affect my current running program?