Search: “WordPress Foundation”

WordPress Uses AI to Stop Malicious Plugin Updates Before They Reach Millions of Websites

WordPress.org now auto-blocks plugin updates flagged by AI review after a backdoor incident, adding a supply-chain gate for millions of sites.

Since June 5, 2026, every WordPress.org plugin and theme release passes a mandatory six-hour cooldown while multiple AI models and Jetpack Scan analyze code changes and produce a consolidated security score; releases above the risk threshold are blocked automatically. The change followed a July 28, 2026 incident where a backdoor was pushed into a plugin with roughly 20,000 active installs, which Wordfence flagged and the Plugins Team pulled 26 minutes later before distribution. Authors are notified of blocking findings and can republish corrected releases or appeal false positives to the Plugins Team.

Cyber Security News·updated Sep 11, 16:33 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 10, 14:08 UTC · 6d agoTools 7 sources1

"WP2Shell" Critical WordPress RCE Chain (CVE-2026-63030 & CVE-2026-60137)

CISA added the WordPress core pre-auth RCE chain (CVE-2026-63030, CVE-2026-60137) to KEV after confirmed exploitation; WordPress 6.9.5 and 7.0.2 fix the flaws.

On July 17, 2026 WordPress disclosed CVE-2026-63030, a REST API route-confusion flaw, and CVE-2026-60137, a SQL injection in WP_Query, which chain to unauthenticated remote code execution on default installs of WordPress 6.9.0-6.9.4 and 7.0.0-7.0.1. CISA has added both to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog and active exploitation is confirmed. Cloudflare deployed WAF rules at 17:03 UTC on July 17, and patches are available in WordPress 6.9.5 and 7.0.2.

Web discovery (articles for new exploits & KEV entries)·Sep 8, 16:27 UTC · 8d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-63030CVE-2026-601371· 1 read

Risky Bulletin: Russia tells data centers to deploy drone defenses

Russia ordered data center operators to deploy drone strike defenses under a Putin decree allowing temporary state takeover of unprotected critical infrastructure.

The Russian government instructed data center operators to deploy protections against drone strikes under a presidential decree signed by Putin that allows temporary state administration of critical infrastructure operators failing to defend against Ukrainian hacks and drone strikes. Although data centers are not formally critical infrastructure in Russia, the decree applies to them because other sectors depend heavily on cloud services; Russia has more than 180 data centers, over 80% in the European region within range of Ukrainian strikes. The digest also reports a Dropbox breach affecting nearly 5,000 accounts via the Lenovo ID integration, spyware attacks on at least 14 Serbians using NoviSpy or Pegasus, and a password recovery attack targeting hundreds of thousands of X accounts tied to the new X Money service. Other items include a 14-hour compromise of Coder's Cloudflare infrastructure delivering malicious Terraform modules, donor data breaches at Davayte and You Are Not Alone via the Stripe/WooCommerce integration, a $2.5M Aquifer crypto heist, and a TVING breach exposing data of almost 40 million accounts.

Risky Business News·Sep 4, 03:02 UTC · 12d agoPolicy & legal

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:30 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

Lazarus Exploits Windows Zero-Day to Gain SYSTEM Access and Deploy Backdoor

Lazarus exploits Windows AFD.sys zero-day CVE-2026-68820 in Operation Dream Job to deploy Troy backdoor at defense firms.

Check Point attributes Operation Dream Job attacks to Lazarus Group exploiting CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS 7.0), a privilege escalation flaw in Windows AFD.sys patched in August 2026 Patch Tuesday. The campaign targets defense and aerospace firms in France, Germany, Brazil, and India via trojanized PDF viewers and DLL side-loading, deploying backdoors Troy, ForestTiger, and the FudModule 3.1 kernel rootkit. Attackers also compromise WordPress, SharePoint, and Roundcube servers as C2, using CVE-2025-49113 and the RelayShell PHP web shell.

The Hacker News·Aug 15, 00:00 UTC · Aug 15, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2026-68820CVE-2025-491132

Five Critical WordPress Plugin and Theme Flaws Enable Site Takeover or RCE

Five critical flaws (CVSS 9.8–10.0) in WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP enable WordPress admin takeover and RCE.

Wordfence and Patchstack disclosed five critical flaws in WordPress plugins and themes: WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP. The issues include unauthenticated authentication bypass (CVE-2026-76581), arbitrary file write leading to RCE (CVE-2026-18431), administrator account takeover via password-reset URL exposure (CVE-2026-19632), privilege escalation (CVE-2026-19598), and PHP object injection to RCE (CVE-2026-82222, CVSS 10.0). Patchstack says the GiveWP flaw chains an unsafe unserialize helper, attacker-controlled donation data, and a gadget chain in shipped code.

The Hacker News·Aug 29, 16:25 UTC · 18d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-76581CVE-2026-18431CVE-2026-19632+2 CVEs

Attackers Expose Ongoing AI Tool Use Targeting Organizations in Latin America

Unit 42 documents two AI-assisted intrusion campaigns against Latin American government, utility, and financial organizations using LLM-orchestrated tooling.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 tracks two ongoing intrusion clusters, CL-CRI-1131 (Mexican transportation, federal ministries, municipal water utilities) and CL-CRI-1163 (Brazilian financial sector), both using living-off-the-land techniques, SOCKS5 relays, and custom RATs. The attackers appear to orchestrate operations via commercial LLMs like Claude and GPT-4.1, evidenced by iterative batch scripts and AI-generated tunneling tool naming. The Mexican campaign (also reported as Operation Escaneo by CloudSEK) exfiltrated sensitive data via dynamic-DNS infrastructure with rotated multi-SAN TLS certificates between February and June 2026. This signals broader adoption of AI-enhanced operations by diverse threat groups in the region.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Sep 3, 10:00 UTC · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild1

WordPress 7.0.4 Release

WordPress releases 7.0.4 with a security fix and urges all sites to update immediately.

WordPress.org announced the availability of WordPress 7.0.4, a maintenance release containing a security fix. Because it is a security release, the project recommends updating sites immediately via the dashboard or a download from WordPress.org. The announcement gives no technical details about the flaw being patched.

WordPress.org · Security·Aug 12, 14:45 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Advisory

ICE Is Buying Access to Credit Card Records

Schneier on Security·Aug 7, 10:27 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Phishing & fraud

Causal Foundation Models

A paper introduces causal foundation models (CFMs): pretrained networks that estimate treatment effects on new datasets via in-context learning without fine-tuning.

Causal foundation models (CFMs) apply the foundation-model paradigm to causal inference, replacing bespoke per-problem estimator pipelines with networks pretrained once at scale. CFMs estimate causal quantities such as the average treatment effect on entirely new datasets through in-context learning, without model updates. The work serves as a practical introduction to the emerging area, covering background in causal inference and machine learning and including example code and Jupyter notebooks.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 1, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI research

WordPress wp2shell Vulnerabilities Exploited in the Wild (CVE-2026 ...

Public exploit code emerged for the WordPress wp2shell pre-auth RCE chain (CVE-2026-63030, CVE-2026-60137); CISA set a July 24 patching deadline.

CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch-route confusion) chained with CVE-2026-60137 (SQL injection in WP_Query's author__not_in) enables pre-authentication RCE in WordPress core, affecting versions 6.8.0-7.0.1. Multiple researchers published working PoCs on GitHub that extract password hashes, crack admin credentials, and upload malicious plugins. CISA added both CVEs to its KEV catalog with a July 24, 2026 deadline, and WordPress.org enabled forced auto-updates; fixes shipped in 6.8.6, 6.9.5, and 7.0.2.

Web discovery (articles for new exploits & KEV entries)·Sep 7, 14:13 UTC · 9d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-63030CVE-2026-60137

Boost Engagement with Free Passkeys by Wordfence

Wordfence 9 introduces free passkey support, letting WordPress users log in without passwords and reducing authentication friction.

Wordfence announced that version 9 of its WordPress security plugin introduces passkeys. The feature removes the need for users to remember or copy passwords from a manager. Wordfence is offering the passkey capability for free.

Wordfence·Sep 15, 19:55 UTC · 21h agoTools

FlyWP Adds Proactive Vulnerability Protection with Patchstack

FlyWP integrated Patchstack into its managed WordPress hosting platform via a new FlySecurity Pro add-on for proactive vulnerability protection.

FlyWP, a managed WordPress cloud hosting and server management provider, has integrated Patchstack vulnerability intelligence into its platform. The new FlySecurity Pro add-on gives customers proactive protection against WordPress vulnerabilities from a single dashboard. The announcement is a vendor partnership rather than a new flaw or incident.

Patchstack·Aug 17, 15:16 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Tools1

New WordPress Pre-Auth XSS Could Lead to PHP Code Execution

The Hacker News·Aug 8, 08:07 UTC · Aug 8, 2026Vulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-646381

Prior Labs Releases TabPFN-3.5: A Tabular Foundation Model That Beats the Winning Otto Kaggle Solution With Default Settings

Prior Labs releases TabPFN-3.5, a 220M-parameter open-weights tabular foundation model that beats the 2015 Otto Kaggle winning score with default settings.

Prior Labs released TabPFN-3.5, a tabular foundation model that predicts in a single forward pass without per-dataset training or tuning. The base model grew from 53M to 220M parameters with a single multitask checkpoint, learned Fourier features, and in-context ECDF rank encodings. It scores 0.375 on the 2015 Otto Kaggle private leaderboard versus the winning 0.382 and claims first place on seven tabular benchmarks including TabArena and BeyondArena. Open weights cover the base, Fast (84M), and Thinking variants, but production use requires the Prior Labs API or a commercial license.

MarkTechPost·06:52 UTC · 10h agoModel release

Wordpress Fixes Critical Plugin

WordPress maintainers patched a critical vulnerability in a widely used plugin, urging site owners to update before potential exploitation.

WordPress has released a fix for a critical vulnerability affecting one of its plugins, per Infosecurity Magazine. Plugins in the WordPress ecosystem often power millions of sites, making timely patching important to limit exposure. The available information does not specify a CVE identifier, affected versions, or whether exploitation has been observed.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 15, 00:00 UTC · Aug 15, 2026Vulnerability

Discovery Foundation Models: Toward Open-Ended Discovery Intelligence

Paper defines Discovery Foundation Models with seven coupled capabilities for open-ended discovery, demonstrated via Zetema and GALILEO systems.

The paper formulates Discovery Foundation Models (DFMs) as general-purpose model systems for open-ended discovery, supporting seven coupled capabilities spanning problem discovery, formulation, representation construction, hypothesis formation, intervention, evidence-grounded revision, and continual improvement. It instantiates the framework with Zetema, which couples explicit research-state dynamics, verification and experimental gating, and cross-task Discovery Skill evolution. The framework is grounded with GALILEO, a real therapeutic-discovery system combining dry-lab reasoning with robotic wet-lab experimentation in a closed physical discovery loop; code is released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers·updated Sep 14, 17:56 UTC · 1d ago·first Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoAI research 2 sources

PHP Webshell Campaign Targets WordPress Through Critical WooCommerce Plugin Bug

Wordfence blocked over 100,000 exploitation attempts against CVE-2026-27540 in WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture, letting attackers upload PHP webshells to WordPress sites.

Wordfence reported more than 100,000 blocked exploitation attempts against CVE-2026-27540 in the WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture plugin (roughly 6,000 active installs), which was disclosed and patched on February 20 in version 2.0.3.2. The unauthenticated AJAX handler wwlc_file_upload_handler reads permitted file extensions from the attacker-controlled request, enabling arbitrary file upload of PHP files such as shell.php that report host details and serve further upload forms. Attack activity peaked between June 4 and June 17, 2026, with additional waves on July 1 and August 30. Wordfence rates the flaw CVSS 9.8, while Patchstack's CVE record lists 9.0.

Infosecurity Magazine·15:00 UTC · 2h agoExploit / PoC in the wild 6 sourcesCVE-2026-27540

WordPress Security Plugins: How to Choose the Right One

Sucuri's guide breaks WordPress security plugins into hardening, malware scanning, integrity monitoring, and filtering types, and explains how to evaluate and layer them.

The Sucuri guide explains that WordPress security plugins bundle five capabilities - hardening, malware detection, integrity monitoring, activity logging, and application-level filtering - and that plugins run only after WordPress loads, unlike server-level firewalls. It lists leading causes of compromise: outdated plugins and themes, weak or reused credentials, nulled premium software, insecure configuration, and shared-hosting cross-contamination. It concludes with evaluation criteria and a post-installation security checklist for owners without dedicated security teams.

Sucuri Blog·Sep 5, 03:01 UTC · 11d agoIndustry

Vulnerability & Patch Roundup — August 2026

Sucuri's monthly roundup compiles August 2026 security patches for the WordPress ecosystem to help site owners prioritize updates against automated exploitation.

Sucuri published its August 2026 Vulnerability & Patch Roundup summarizing essential security updates across the WordPress ecosystem. The post notes that most breaches the company observes begin with automated attacks exploiting previously disclosed vulnerabilities. It urges website operators to apply the listed plugin and theme patches promptly to avoid compromise and costly remediation. No specific CVE identifiers are named in the announcement.

Sucuri Blog·Sep 1, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoAdvisory

WordPress XSS2Shell Flaw Turns Simple Login Bug Into Full Server Takeover

Security Affairs·Aug 7, 16:49 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Exploit / PoC1

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (August 24, 2026 to August 30, 2026)

Wordfence's weekly report summarizes newly disclosed WordPress ecosystem vulnerabilities added to its intelligence database for August 24-30, 2026.

Wordfence published its weekly WordPress vulnerability report covering disclosures added to the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability Database between August 24 and August 30, 2026. The report directs site owners to review the aggregated vulnerabilities to determine whether their sites are affected. The published text provides no specific CVE identifiers or affected products.

Wordfence·Sep 3, 18:27 UTC · 12d agoAdvisory

$20 per zero-day is already the WordPress plugin reality

TrendAI and CHT Security used an AI pipeline to find over 300 verified WordPress plugin zero-days at roughly $20 per vulnerability.

A pipeline built in three days by TrendAI and CHT Security, presented at Ekoparty Miami, paired AI-driven static analysis with automated Docker provisioning and Chrome DevTools MCP dynamic verification to surface more than 300 critical zero-days in WordPress plugins within 72 hours. The run consumed about 222 million tokens across 95 tasks, averaging roughly $20 per verified vulnerability, with findings including pre-auth RCE, SQL injection, privilege escalation, SSRF, and an AI-assembled downgrade attack chain. Dynamic verification eliminated over 80% of false positives, but manual review at 30-60 minutes per finding remains the bottleneck, straining ZDI and NIST triage backlogs.

Help Net Security·Aug 24, 04:21 UTC · 23d agoResearch1

Making Knowledge Distillation Cheap Enough to Run at Scale

Hugging Face blog by Multiverse Computing describes techniques making knowledge distillation cheap enough for large-scale training.

A Hugging Face blog post from Multiverse Computing (CAI) presents methods for reducing the cost of knowledge distillation so it can be run at scale. The post is aimed at practitioners compressing large models into smaller, cheaper ones for production use.

Hugging Face Blog·Aug 10, 10:05 UTC · Aug 10, 2026AI research

400,000 WordPress Sites Affected by Account Takeover Vulnerability in TranslatePress WordPress Plugin

Wordfence disclosed an unauthenticated account takeover flaw in the TranslatePress WordPress plugin, installed on over 400,000 sites, enabling full admin compromise.

On August 11, 2026, Wordfence received a submission for an unauthenticated account takeover vulnerability in TranslatePress, a WordPress plugin with more than 400,000 active installations. Unauthenticated attackers can obtain an administrator's password reset link, reset the account's password, and log in as that administrator. Full compromise of the affected site is possible without any authentication. Exploitation in the wild was not reported at disclosure.

Wordfence·Aug 25, 15:10 UTC · 22d agoVulnerability

Forminator WordPress Flaw Can Enable Unauthenticated RCE via Malicious PHP Uploads

Wordfence disclosed CVE-2026-15748, a critical unauthenticated file upload flaw enabling RCE in the Forminator Forms WordPress plugin, patched in version 1.56.2.

Wordfence reported CVE-2026-15748 (CVSS 9.8) in Forminator Forms, a WordPress plugin with over 600,000 active installations, allowing unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary PHP files and achieve remote code execution. The flaw stems from insufficient file type validation in the handle_file_upload() function, and exploitation requires a form containing both a File Upload field and a Select field, plus a custom upload storage root lacking .htaccess PHP protection. All versions up to and including 1.56.1 are affected; version 1.56.2 released July 31, 2026 fixes the issue. Wordfence also disclosed CVE-2026-15826 (CVSS 9.8), an authentication bypass in User Profile Builder (40,000+ installs) letting unauthenticated attackers log in as administrator, fixed in version 3.16.5 on July 16, 2026.

The Hacker News·Aug 17, 18:22 UTC · 29d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-15748CVE-2026-15826

Critical GiveWP Flaw Lets Attackers Run Commands on WordPress Servers

Critical unauthenticated PHP object injection (CVE-2026-82222) in the GiveWP WordPress donation plugin chains to remote code execution; version 4.16.7.2 fixes it.

Patchstack disclosed CVE-2026-82222 (CVSS 10.0), an unauthenticated PHP object injection in GiveWP versions through 4.16.7.1 that chains through TCPDF and Give\TestData gadget classes to arbitrary OS command execution as the web server user. On versions 4.16.5.1 and below, a default installation with one published donation form is enough to exploit, with no user interaction required. Version 4.16.7.2 blocks unsafe serialized data, hardens the gadget chain and cleans already-stored database records; a separate registration bypass issue remains unresolved.

Security Affairs·Aug 31, 07:54 UTC · 16d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-82222

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (August 31, 2026 to September 6, 2026)

Wordfence's weekly WordPress vulnerability report summarizes plugin and theme vulnerabilities disclosed and added to its database during the week ending September 6, 2026.

Wordfence published its weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report covering disclosures between August 31 and September 6, 2026. The report lists new vulnerabilities added to the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability Database and highlights contributors to WordPress Security. Administrators are advised to review the listed plugin and theme vulnerabilities to check whether their sites are affected.

Wordfence·Sep 10, 19:08 UTC · 5d agoAdvisory

Unauthenticated PHP Object Injection to Remote Code Execution on GiveWP

Patchstack details an unauthenticated PHP object injection chain enabling remote code execution in the GiveWP WordPress donation plugin.

Patchstack disclosed an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in the GiveWP WordPress donation plugin. An attacker with no account can execute arbitrary commands on the server of an affected GiveWP site. The full chain is reachable when a site has one published donation form and one active payment gateway, a configuration the researcher describes as a common default.

Patchstack·Aug 28, 09:39 UTC · 19d agoVulnerability

WordPress Adds Automated Plugin Reviews to Block High-Risk Updates Before Distribution

WordPress will automatically scan every plugin release and block high-risk updates from distribution using AI analysis plus Jetpack Scan.

WordPress announced automated security reviews for every plugin release during its cooldown period before distribution through the WordPress.org update API, combining AI models with Jetpack Scan into a security score. The system already caught a backdoor committed to a plugin with about 20,000 active installations on July 28, 2026, blocking it within 26 minutes of a Wordfence alert. Flagged patterns include missing capability checks, unsafe $wpdb queries, unserialize() on request data, and obfuscated code.

The Hacker News·Sep 14, 16:00 UTC · 2d agoTools

Evaluating Time-Series Foundation Models and Multimodal Dietary Context for CGM Forecasting

Study finds zero-shot time-series foundation models underperform on CGM forecasting; fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt cuts RMSE up to 18.4% and dietary context adds signal.

The paper evaluates time-series foundation models for continuous glucose monitoring forecasting across eight public datasets covering Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and non-diabetes populations. Under a unified protocol, zero-shot foundation models did not consistently outperform baselines like Elastic Net and PatchTST, but lightweight fine-tuning did, with fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt reducing RMSE by 6.5%-18.4% in the T1D cohort and 8.6%-18.2% in the non-diabetes/T2D cohort. A residual-based fusion framework adding dietary context from CGMacros reduced overall RMSE by about 3% and postprandial RMSE by about 15% versus CGM-only baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:43 UTC · 5d agoAI research