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wp2shell: incident response guide (CVE-2026-63030 + CVE-2026-60137)

Eye Security published forensic IR tooling for wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030/CVE-2026-60137), the unauthenticated WordPress core RCE chain, after WordPress.org forced auto-updates.

wp2shell chains a REST API batch-endpoint route-confusion bug (CVE-2026-63030) with an SQL injection in WP_Query's author__not_in parameter (CVE-2026-60137), giving unauthenticated attackers rogue admin and code execution on default installs. Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber discovered the flaw, a public PoC exists on GitHub, and WordPress.org forced automatic updates across an estimated 200M+ sites. Eye Security released a compromise-scanner WordPress plugin and browser extension and notes database artifacts (oEmbed cache rows, changesets) are the primary evidence since the attack is log-blind; fixed versions are 6.8.6, 6.9.5, and 7.0.2.

Web discovery (articles for new exploits & KEV entries) · 8d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-63030CVE-2026-601371

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 · 3h agoExploit / PoC in the wild 6 sourcesCVE-2026-27540

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) · 9d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-63030CVE-2026-60137

$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 · 23d agoResearch1

Quantum Feature Engineering for Credit Default Prediction: When and Why IQP Circuits Help Linear Classifiers

Quantum IQP circuit features lift logistic-regression credit-default F1 from 0.462 to 0.517, beating Kernel PCA at an equal feature budget.

Using the UCI Default of Credit Card Clients dataset and five-fold cross-validation, an 8-qubit IQP circuit adds 16 features that raise Logistic Regression F1 from 0.462 to 0.517 (+0.055, p < 0.0001). Kernel PCA, the best classical non-linear alternative, reaches only 0.493 at the same feature count, with the gap surviving Benjamini-Hochberg correction across 12 tests (p = 0.00007). Only the linear classifier benefits, pointing to a linear-expressivity mechanism. Feature selection matters: Random Forest importance-guided selection reaches F1 = 0.523 while maximally uncorrelated features drop to 0.496.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

HyQuant: Hybrid-Precision Quantization for LLM Attention

HyQuant keeps most LLM attention states low-bit while preserving vertical-line tokens and local windows in high precision, maintaining near-lossless accuracy.

HyQuant is a hybrid-precision quantization framework for LLM attention that quantizes most attention states to low bits while keeping accuracy-critical vertical-line tokens and local-window states in full precision, selected via lightweight attention-pattern signals. In the prefill stage it uses a hybrid-precision attention operator, and in the decode stage it applies the same principle to KV-cache compression with fused dequantization and attention computation. Across diverse tasks, models, and datasets it maintains nearly lossless accuracy; code is available on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers · 19d agoAI tools & infra1

$536 and 8 Hours: AI Learns to Attack a Different PLC

Forescout used Claude to port a WAGO PLC exploit for $536 in 8 hours, and an AI-generated payload later permanently bricked the test device.

Forescout researchers used Claude Code with Ghidra, terminal access, and physical hardware to port CVE-2021-31886, a pre-authentication buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server, from a WAGO 750-852 PLC to the WAGO 750-831 without source code or debugger access. The final RCE development stage cost $535.74 in API fees over an 8-hour, 32-minute session (2.6k input and 1.3M output tokens) and required heavy researcher guidance. Claude produced working ICMP and UDP beacon exploits in 12 minutes after identifying that normal FTP command completion was overwriting its shellcode, fixed by omitting the CRLF terminator. A follow-up session extending the payloads toward a C2 implant wrote to flash-mapped memory and permanently bricked the PLC, underscoring the risks of autonomous agents operating against physical infrastructure.

Security Affairs · 14d agoResearchCVE-2021-318861

Pre-Whitening and BCJR Posterior Distillation for Bi-LSTM Detection in Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling

Study shows nested-window Bi-LSTM architectures do not improve faster-than-Nyquist detection; pre-whitening plus BCJR distillation cuts bit error rates.

Across roughly 260 controlled trainings, processing nested intersymbol-interference windows in separate recurrent branches never significantly beat a plain Bi-LSTM at matched parameter budgets. The authors attribute the limitation to the observation model rather than architecture, and instead pre-whiten inputs and distill BCJR soft posteriors into the network. With 3.4% more parameters, the method reaches 1.05x the BCJR bit error rate at compression factor 0.8 and 1.89x at 0.7, improving to 1.47x with a wider whitened window.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

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, 2026Tools1

Attention Quantization for Tabular Foundation Models

FP8 quantization of attention queries, keys, and values speeds tabular foundation model inference up to 1.7x with no accuracy loss.

The paper develops an FP8 quantization strategy targeting attention calculations (queries, keys, values) in tabular foundation models, arguing attention matters more than weight or KV cache quantization given their differing size and serving patterns versus LLMs. Aligning quantization error between test rows and training rows proves crucial, since misalignment causes drastic accuracy drops. A Triton kernel using explicit FP8 matrix multiplication achieves up to 1.7x speedup over regular 16-bit kernels, with no relevant accuracy loss on TabPFN-v3 and TabICLv2 across TabArena and BeyondArena benchmarks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

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 · 16d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-82222

Case study: ManageWP Blocks 11.9M+ Threats in 6 Months with Patchstack

Patchstack case study says ManageWP blocked over 11.9M WordPress threats in six months, with top vulnerabilities weaponized in a median of five hours.

ManageWP reports blocking more than 11.9 million threats across managed WordPress sites in six months using Patchstack's vulnerability data and firewalling. The case study stresses that patching alone cannot close the gap, noting attackers weaponize the most-targeted WordPress vulnerabilities with a median of five hours. The piece is primarily vendor marketing aimed at agencies managing many sites.

Patchstack · 23d agoIndustry

PLC-DPO: Posterior Label Correction in Noisy and Ambiguous Preference Optimization

PLC-DPO corrects noisy preference labels during DPO by routing each pair as clean, flip, or tie using calibrated policy-reference margins.

PLC-DPO addresses reversed, weak, or ambiguous preference labels in Direct Preference Optimization by using the calibrated policy-reference margin as online evidence to route each pair's training signal as clean, flip, or tie. This actively corrects supervision direction and strength rather than only filtering suspicious examples. Across 57 dataset-model-benchmark cells, PLC-DPO achieves the best mean win rate of 60.5 versus 55.5 for the next-best method. Injected-noise and tie stress tests plus human disagreement analysis show the routing stays stable and distinguishes flipped from weakly directional pairs.

Hugging Face daily papers · 16d agoAI research

Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation

TGOPD verifies teacher reliability per prompt before on-policy distillation, outperforming vanilla OPD across math, code, and instruction benchmarks.

Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD) estimates teacher reliability from verifier-scored teacher probes and routes each prompt either to dense on-policy distillation or to verifier-grounded GRPO, avoiding misleading updates from confidently wrong teachers under mode-seeking reverse KL. Across 4B and 35B students in mathematics, code, and instruction following, TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD in all six single-domain settings and achieves higher seven-benchmark averages under multi-domain training. It also raises teacher-node GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in the measured 4B single-domain run by reusing idle teacher capacity.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

FreeFlow is a bias-free hierarchical transformer achieving state-of-the-art optical flow results on Sintel, KITTI-2015, and Spring benchmarks.

FreeFlow replaces task-specific inductive biases like correlation volumes and iterative warping with a single feed-forward encoder-decoder combining window, shifted-window, and reduced-resolution global attention. It reaches 0.68/1.48 EPE on Sintel Clean/Final, 3.23 Fl-all on KITTI-2015, and 3.192 1px on Spring. The architecture scales consistently from small to large variants and remains memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Do speech foundation models really learn words?

Researchers show via residualization that later layers of HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 encode word identity and semantics independently of phonetic content.

The study argues that discriminative ability on words does not imply specialized word representations, since good word discrimination can be explained by phoneme encoding alone. By partialling out phoneme information using residualization, the authors show that later layers of HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 encode words with reasonable fidelity independently of local phonetic content. Applying this disentanglement approach enhances higher-order linguistic information in word discovery tasks, informing analysis of speech foundation models used for recognition and speech tokens.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

5 Million WordPress Sites Affected by SQL Injection Vulnerability in All-in-One WP Migration and Backup WordPress Plugin

Unauthenticated second-order SQL injection found in All-in-One WP Migration and Backup plugin with 5+ million active installs.

Wordfence received a submission on August 14, 2026 for an unauthenticated second-order SQL injection vulnerability in the All-in-One WP Migration and Backup WordPress plugin. The plugin has more than 5 million active installations. The disclosure text does not include a CVE id, a patch version, or evidence of exploitation.

Wordfence · 15d agoVulnerability

StopAndProtect Turns 2,000 Hacked WordPress Sites Into a Criminal Network

Check Point uncovered StopAndProtect, a cybercrime operation using ~2,000 hacked WordPress sites for ClickFix-driven malware delivery, data theft, surveillance, and ransomware.

Check Point Research identified the StopAndProtect operation in May 2026; it abuses close to 2,000 compromised WordPress sites, many running outdated software, to host malware stages, act as C2, and store stolen data. Infection starts with fake CAPTCHA ClickFix prompts that trick visitors into running a PowerShell command, followed by .NET downloaders deploying ransomware, SMB/USB worm, lockscreen, chat, and credential-stealing components. Rather than always encrypting, operators selectively exfiltrate file lists and specific files; researchers found 700+ stolen-data archives, roughly 31,000 screenshots, and 6,000+ unique victim IP addresses, including WhatsApp activity monitoring.

Security Affairs · 27d agoThreat actor in the wild

Researchers Use Claude to Port Pre-Auth RCE Exploit From One PLC Model to Another

Forescout used Anthropic's Claude to port a working pre-auth RCE exploit for CVE-2021-31886 between WAGO PLCs, executing ARM shellcode on live hardware.

Forescout Vedere Labs used Claude interactively to port an RCE exploit for CVE-2021-31886, a CVSS 9.8 stack buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server's USER command, from a WAGO 750-852 to a WAGO 750-831 PLC, running attacker-supplied ARM shellcode. The final RCE stage cost $535.74 in API usage over 8 hours 32 minutes, and a follow-up attempt to build a C2 implant permanently bricked the device. CERT@VDE lists many Nucleus V1-based WAGO models as vulnerable with no updates available; Siemens plans no Nucleus NET remediation. The work follows a joint NSA/CISA/FBI/DOE/EPA advisory warning of AI-generated exploitation scripts targeting internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs.

The Hacker News · 14d agoResearchCVE-2021-318862

Learning with Covariance Matrices: Principal Component Analysis Meets Learning with Graphs

Theoretical tutorial establishes equivalence between covariance neural networks and PCA, with stability and transferability bounds and brain-age applications.

The paper reviews the theory of coVariance neural networks (VNNs), graph neural networks that operate on covariance matrices as graphs. It derives a conceptual equivalence between VNNs and PCA-based information processing, refined stability bounds under finite-sample covariance perturbations, and transferability characterizations across multiscale datasets. Demonstrated applications include brain age gap estimation for neurodegenerative conditions from neuroimaging data.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Eliciting Weak-to-Strong Generalization with On-Policy Reverse Distillation

OPRD distillation enables weak-to-strong generalization by amplifying verifier-supported policy updates, outperforming existing RL and distillation methods with fewer student updates.

On-Policy Reverse Distillation (OPRD) evaluates a weak teacher's policy shift relative to its reference policy on student rollouts and amplifies the verifier-supported component of the student's policy gradient. This rescaling preserves the stationary points of policy optimization while letting the student learn beyond the teacher's capacity ceiling. In successive model transfer and multi-teacher distillation, OPRD achieves higher performance with fewer student updates than existing RL and distillation approaches, and response-style analysis shows students remain closer to verifier-RL-trained models than to their weak teachers.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Sakana AI Researchers Introduce PC-ALM, a Layer-Local Alternative to Backpropagation That Trains 1000-Layer Networks

Sakana AI's PC-ALM adds per-layer Lagrange multipliers to predictive coding, matching backprop on networks up to 1000 layers with layer-local updates.

Sakana AI researchers propose Augmented Lagrangian Predictive Coding (PC-ALM), a training method that keeps every update layer-local while recovering backprop-aligned credit signals. The team proves multipliers converge to exact backprop adjoints in linear networks and trains 1000-layer residual MLPs on MNIST within about 2 points of backprop accuracy. PC-ALM matched backprop across a width/depth grid from 8 to 128 on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST where standard predictive coding failed in deep, narrow networks, and improved over PC on ResNet-18 with CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet. An MIT-licensed JAX reference implementation reproduces the results on CPU.

MarkTechPost · 1d agoAI research1

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 · 2d agoTools

AdamX: Cosine similarity meets gradient descent

Researchers propose AdamX, a cosine-similarity-based first-order optimizer with variance rectification that matches Adam-class convergence across benchmark datasets and architectures.

The paper introduces AdamX, a first-order optimizer that uses cosine similarity as an adaptive mechanism for controlling update magnitudes, plus a variance rectification scheme for smoother optimization early in training. The method is described as scalable, model-agnostic, and straightforward to integrate into existing pipelines. Empirically, AdamX shows competitive convergence rates measured by epochs to reach performance thresholds under a fixed hyperparameter budget, with code and experiments released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

NCP-ArchPreview Technical Report: Moving towards Latent Space Language Models through Next Concept Prediction

An 8.9B-parameter latent-space language model using next-concept prediction matches OLMo-3-7B pretraining loss with only 51.3% of the training tokens.

NCP-ArchPreview augments next-token prediction with Next Concept Prediction over a product-quantized concept vocabulary built from hidden states, trained jointly end-to-end. The 8.9B model was trained on 5.73T tokens from the Dolma-3 dataset, the largest latent-space language model demonstration to date. It consumes 51.3% of the tokens to reach OLMo-3-7B's final pretraining loss and outperforms it by 2.45 points on the downstream macro-average, including a 5.99-point GSM8K gain. The learned latent space also enables lightweight domain adaptation via a 17M-parameter VQ module and improves speculative drafting accepted length by 4.17%.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

Cross-Model Agreement as a Deployment-Time Reliability Signal for Automatic Polyp Segmentation

Referee-Based Quality Estimation flags unreliable polyp segmentations at inference without ground truth, reaching ROC-AUC 0.960 with SegFormer-B0 referees.

RBQE measures agreement between a primary segmentation model and an independently trained referee on a 1,223-image external benchmark drawn from four public datasets. A cross-architecture SegFormer-B0 referee achieves the strongest signal (ROC-AUC 0.960), beating a Test-Time Augmentation baseline by 0.055 ROC-AUC under an identical protocol. Excluding trivially separable empty-mask cases, ROC-AUC falls to 0.876 (SegFormer-B0) and 0.783 (same-architecture control), but RBQE's margin over baselines widens. Progressive rejection of low-agreement predictions increases mean Dice of retained outputs, supporting selective prediction at the cost of one extra forward pass.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

3D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Novel View Synthesis

Researchers propose 3DPS, a differentiable point renderer for mmWave radar novel view synthesis that outperforms optical-NVS baselines by 1.7x-5.2x.

The paper introduces 3D Point Splatting (3DPS), the first differentiable point renderer for radar, derived from the solid-angle form of the radar equation with ITU-R P.2040 material models and complex phasor splatting. On six outdoor ColoRadar scenes it reaches 0.587 mean Pearson correlation on held-out range-azimuth images, between 1.7x and 5.2x the RadarSplat, Radar Fields, and DART baselines. The same optimized scene produces ADC, complex range profile, and RA outputs via standard FFT pipelines, and training takes about 3 minutes per scene on an RTX 4090.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

Embedded Graph Flows for Categorical Graph Generation

Researchers propose Embedded Graph Flows, a generative model with learned categorical embeddings that beats DiGress and GruM on molecular graph benchmarks.

Embedded Graph Flows (EGF) learns continuous embeddings for node and unordered-edge categories and transports Gaussian noise toward these endpoints using a permutation-equivariant graph transformer. On QM9 it achieves the best result on all four reported metrics, with a Fréchet ChemNet Distance of 0.150 versus 0.717 for DiGress and 0.812 for GruM. On ZINC250k it retains the lowest NSPDK MMD, indicating close agreement with local substructures of reference molecules. Code is released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research1