Attackers have begun to exploit two critical vulnerabilities in WordPress that, when combined together, enable unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and complete compromise of vulnerable websites.
The two security flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137, have been codenamed wp2shell.
“By the early hours of Saturday morning (UTC), successful exploitation was already well underway, initially using public exploit code to exfiltrate hashed credentials, with remote code execution following once additional details were made public,” Jake Knott, principal security researcher at watchTowr, told The Hacker News in a statement.
“From our vantage point across a global client base, we are seeing widespread impact of this vulnerability across organizations of every size and every vertical.”
Telemetry data captured by KEVIntel shows that 13 unique IP addresses from Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., Indonesia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Singapore have been linked to the exploitation of CVE-2026-63030.
Ryan Dewhurst, founder and CEO of KEVIntel, told The Hacker News that exploitation has expanded from targeting WordPress-specific sensors to broad Internet scanning, with the requests matching publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits.
“Attackers used multiple SQL injection techniques, including blind, UNION-based and Boolean-based payloads,” Dewhurst said. “In our own testing, AI-assisted analysis made reproducing the vulnerability and developing a working proof of concept trivial. This significantly lowers the technical barrier for producing exploit code once sufficient vulnerability details are publicly available.”
The exploit chain, discovered by Searchlight Cyber using OpenAI GPT 5.6 Sol in over 10 hours, essentially allows unauthenticated attackers to gain remote code execution on default WordPress installations in any WordPress version released since December 2025. Technical details have been withheld in light of the severity of the issue.
“The attack has no preconditions and can be exploited by an anonymous user in a stock install of WordPress with no plugins,” Searchlight Cyber said.
According to Cloudflare, CVE-2026-63030 enables unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) only when persistent object cache is not in use. While the SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2026-60137) is present from version 6.8 onwards, the RCE affects versions from 6.9.
“This exploit utilizes a two-part vulnerability chain to achieve unauthenticated code execution on a stock WordPress installation with a single HTTP request,” Ben Marr, security engineer at Intruder, explained]. “CVE-2026-63030 is the entry point – a route confusion bug in the REST API batch endpoint that bypasses authentication, allowing an attacker to invoke internal handlers without any permission check.”
“This flaw arises from the improper sanitization of the ‘author__not_in’ parameter within ‘WP_Query’ when untrusted data is passed to it by a plugin or theme. This vulnerability allows crafted input to alter a database query, potentially leading to unauthorized access or manipulation of data.”
Data from Google-owned Wiz suggests that 60% of organizations using WordPress initially had at least one vulnerable instance at the time these CVEs were published, and 25% were exposing a vulnerable server to the Internet. The figures have since dropped as organizations continue to apply the fixes.
The cloud security subsidiary has observed the following post-exploitation activities following the abuse of the two flaws –
- Uploading a malicious plugin
- Enumerating users and harvesting admin usernames and email addresses
- Performing local file inclusion (LFI) attacks to target database credentials and authentication keys for exfiltration
- Accessing the admin panel and successfully authenticating themselves
- Uploading a bare-bones PHP web shell that facilitates remote code execution
“We’ve also observed high-volume scanning activity without subsequent post-exploitation, suggesting opportunistic mass-scanning campaigns seeking to identify vulnerable targets alongside legitimate security scanning activity,” Wiz researchers Shahar Dorfman and Gili Tikochinski said. “We have yet to identify lateral movement or data exfiltration, but we continue to monitor and investigate.”
Also observed as part of the activity is a 150 KB web shell that’s disguised as a legitimate WordPress security plugin called CMSmap. It acts as a “full-featured attack platform” supporting file management, database access, port scanning, batch code injection, and multiple privilege escalation modules, including MySQL UDF exploitation.
WatchTowr also said attackers have begun to spray the Internet in an indiscriminate fashion following the release of a public exploit, with its honeypots registering “tens of thousands of exploitation attempts.”
More than 100 backdoor administrator accounts are said to have been created following exploitation, allowing the attackers to deploy fake WordPress plugins to gain code execution or download secondary tools to further compromise the system. In at least one case, a threat actor has been observed repeatedly attempting to install Overlord RAT, a Golang-based remote access trojan.
Defenders are recommended to inspect their WordPress instances for new administrator accounts, malicious plugins, or other suspicious files, regardless of whether they’ve been patched, to completely root out the threat.
Dewhurst said the potential blast radius was reduced due to defensive measures already in place. “WordPress has supported automatic background updates for security releases for several years, and some infrastructure providers received advance notice and were able to deploy virtual patches quickly,” he added. “These measures reduced the exposure window for sites that updated automatically or were protected by the relevant WAF rules.
“However, sites where automatic updates were disabled, unsupported or unsuccessful may remain vulnerable. Given the scale of WordPress deployment across the web, a significant number of installations may still be unpatched. Operators of sites that remained vulnerable after public exploit code became available should update immediately and review their systems for indicators of compromise rather than assuming that applying the patch alone is sufficient.”
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/wordpress-wp2shell-exploitation-grows.html?m=1
