If you use WordPress, patch now. Just hours after fixes came out, attackers have begun exploiting two bugs that, when chained together, allow pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE). And security researchers tell us there’s a very good chance the miscreants had an AI assist. “Once the vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed, reproducing them with the help of frontier AI models was only a matter of time and tokens,” Jake Knott, watchTowr principal security researcher, told The Register. “WatchTowr was able to trivially reproduce CVE-2026-63030 within minutes of disclosure, and the second CVE-2026-60137 with some additional effort.” WordPress released patches for both CVEs late Friday, but by Saturday it was game over. “By the early hours of Saturday morning, 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,” Knott said. “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.” Here are the details about both security holes, and what went down since WordPress revealed and fixed them on Friday. CVE-2026-60137 is a moderate-severity SQL injection issue, and CVE-2026-63030 is a critical REST API batch-route confusion bug. “A route confusion flaw causes the arrays containing the sub-requests, validation results, and matched handlers to become misaligned,” Hacktron researchers explained. This causes WordPress to become confused about which requests have been properly validated and thus treat all requests as trusted, including those that it should block. Individually, the bugs are difficult to exploit. But when chained together, they can wreak havoc on any organization using a vulnerable WordPress version because they allow unauthenticated RCE. WordPress 6.9 is affected by both vulnerabilities, and version 6.9.5 contains fixes for both, while WordPress 6.8 is only affected by the SQL injection flaw, and version 6.8.6 fixes it. Additionally, WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 is also vulnerable. Version 7.1 Beta 2 fixes both CVEs. Versions of WordPress prior to 6.8 are not affected. John Blackbourn, one of the WordPress core developers, recommended affected users “update your sites immediately.” Because of the flaws’ severity, the WordPress security team “enabled forced updates via the auto-update system for sites running affected versions,” he added. The content management system credited Searchlight Cyber researcher Adam Kues with finding and reporting CVE-2026-63030, and in a subsequent Friday advisory, Kues dubbed the bug wp2shell. “The attack has no preconditions and can be exploited by an anonymous user in a stock install of WordPress with no plugins,” Kues said, adding that his security shop released a free wp2shell checker to determine if your instance is vulnerable. Security firm PatchStack reported exploitation of both CVEs as of Friday night, but didn’t provide details about the attacks. VulnCheck’s research team, which also began researching the patches on Friday, verified more than two dozen unique proof-of-concept exploits targeting WP2Shell as of Sunday. “After public exploit code was released, attackers began spraying the internet indiscriminately, hitting anything reachable and trying to get lucky,” Knott told us. “Our honeypots recorded tens of thousands of exploitation attempts, and more than 100 backdoor accounts created by different threat actors using variations of public tooling.” After creating these backdoor admin accounts, watchTowr observed attackers deploying fake WordPress plugins to achieve RCE, exfiltrate credentials or secrets, or download additional tooling to further compromise the system, he added. “In one case, we watched a threat actor repeatedly attempt to pull down Overlord RAT, a Golang-based remote access trojan.” Any orgs that waited until Monday to patch are likely already compromised, Knott warned. “Defenders need to inspect their WordPress instances for new administrator accounts, malicious plugins, or other suspicious files, regardless of whether they’ve patched,” he said.®