Let’s talk about WP2Shell, because if you are running WordPress and have not patched yet, you are basically sitting on a live wire.
What is WP2Shell, actually
Two bugs, chained together. First one is a plain old SQL injection. Second one is a REST API route confusion issue, rated 9.8 out of 10 on severity, which basically lets an attacker skip authentication altogether. Chain both, and you get unauthenticated remote code execution on a stock WordPress install. No plugin required, nothing. Just core WordPress, out of the box.
WordPress 6.9.5 and 7.0.2 fixed this on Friday with an emergency patch. But here is the thing, more than 400 million sites run on the affected versions, and industry estimates say around 15% are still not updated. Do the maths, that is close to 90 million sites still exposed as we speak.
AI found it, AI also broke it
This is the part that should worry every WordPress developer, not just site owners.
A researcher named Adam Kues, working with Searchlight Cyber, used GPT-5.6 to find this vulnerability. Took him roughly 10 hours. On the exploit market, a find like this is valued at something like $500,000. Ten hours, one AI model, a half a million dollar bug. Let that sink in.
On the other side, watchTowr’s team took the disclosed bug and reproduced the exploit “within minutes” using frontier AI models. Basically, the gap between “bug is public” and “bug is weaponized” has almost disappeared. Earlier this used to take days, sometimes weeks. Now it is minutes.
How bad is it on the ground
Pretty bad, not going to sugarcoat it.
- By early Saturday itself, honeypots had logged tens of thousands of attack attempts.
- More than 100 backdoor admin accounts were created by different attacker groups. This is not one guy working alone, multiple groups are in the game.
- VulnCheck confirmed more than two dozen distinct exploit variants floating around by Sunday.
- Wiz reported that 60% of WordPress organizations had exposed instances the moment this became public.
Security researcher Jake Knott said it plainly: anyone waiting till Monday to patch is probably already compromised. So basically, if your team was planning to patch “on Monday,” you were already late.
What you should do right now
- Update to WordPress 6.9.5 or 7.0.2 immediately. Do not wait for a maintenance window.
- Check your admin users list properly. If you see any account you do not recognize, remove it and rotate all admin passwords, not just that one account’s password.
- Even after patching, assume you were exposed during the gap. Check for unexpected file changes, new wp-cron scheduled tasks, and any plugin or theme upload you did not personally do.
- If you manage multiple WordPress sites, this means you specifically. Do not depend on manual updates alone. WordPress pushed this out as a forced auto-update given how serious it is, so confirm auto-updates are not disabled anywhere in your fleet.
Our take
This whole WP2Shell episode is basically a preview of how security is going to work from now on. AI models can find bugs fast, and the same models can be used to exploit them just as fast. The old assumption, that you get a few days of breathing room between disclosure and real-world attacks, simply does not hold anymore.
If you are running WordPress in production, patching is not optional homework. It is today’s task, full stop.