WordPress's Worst Security Flaw in a Decade Was Found by AI in 10 Hours

Three days ago, WPWithin covered the emergency WordPress 7.0.2 release that fixed a critical flaw letting an attacker with no account take over a plain WordPress site. The exploit chain now has a name, wp2shell, and an unusual origin story: a researcher found it using an AI model in about 10 hours, for roughly $25 in compute costs.

What happened

Wordfence, which tracks WordPress security threats, says wp2shell combines two bugs, tracked as CVE-2026-60137 and CVE-2026-63030, into a chain that lets an anonymous attacker run code on a vulnerable site with no plugin required. WordPress patched it in versions 6.8.6, 6.9.5, and 7.0.2 on July 17. Wordfence calls it the first critical, unauthenticated remote-code-execution flaw in WordPress core in nearly a decade.

The researcher who found it, Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber’s Assetnote division, wrote up how he did it. He pointed OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra model at a stripped-down copy of WordPress core, with its version history removed so the model couldn’t shortcut its way to a known fix, and told it to search aggressively across input handling, file uploads, and error handling using several parallel search threads. The model chained together six separate mechanisms inside WordPress, including a validation bypass in how the REST API processes batch requests, to go from anonymous visitor to full admin control. Kues says the work took about 10 hours and burned through roughly half his weekly usage on a $200 AI subscription, around $25 worth of compute.

Searchlight Cyber says the flaw affects the vast majority of WordPress installs running default settings, an install base it puts at over 500 million sites.

Why this matters even if you already updated

The fact that an AI model found this entire chain in a single working day, for the price of a takeout lunch, is a preview of how fast vulnerability research is moving. Expect flaws like this to surface faster going forward, and expect attackers to have access to the same tools.

What to do

If you haven’t confirmed your site is running 7.0.2, 6.9.5, or 6.8.6, do it today. Wordfence Premium, Care, and Response customers received a firewall rule against wp2shell on July 17, the day the patch shipped. Free Wordfence users don’t get the same rule until August 16, so an updated WordPress core is your only protection until then.

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