$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.
ZDI-26-526: (0Day) PAX Technology Q80 Application Installer Signature Verification Bypass Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
ZDI discloses an unauthenticated, network-adjacent RCE in PAX Technology Q80 payment terminals via installer signature bypass, rated CVSS 7.5.
ZDI-26-526 describes a signature verification bypass in the PAX Technology Q80 application installer that lets network-adjacent attackers execute arbitrary code without authentication. The 0-day is tracked as CVE-2026-19910 and CVE-2026-19911 and carries a CVSS score of 7.5. No public patch was noted at the time of disclosure.
Cursor Security Bug Allowed Repositories to Execute Commands Before Trust Verification
Cursor fixed a pre-trust bug letting untrusted repositories execute commands, then closed the report as informative.
A security flaw in the Cursor editor allowed repositories to execute commands before the user completed workspace trust verification. Cursor fixed the pre-trust code execution path within three days of receiving the report. The vendor then closed the report as informative, disputing the severity of the behavior.
Zombie Card Attack Can Revive Expired Visa Cards for Contactless Payments
UMass Amherst researchers demonstrate Zombie Card, an NFC relay attack that revives expired Visa contactless cards for in-store purchases without breaking cryptography.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst presented the Zombie Card attack at USENIX Security 2026, showing that Visa's Kernel 3 does not cryptographically bind the Application Expiration Date (tag 5F24) the terminal reads with the Track 2 expiry seen by the issuer. By positioning an NFC man-in-the-middle relay, an attacker can rewrite the terminal-facing expiration date of an expired card and complete contactless purchases, provided the account remains open under the same PAN and the bank does not independently re-check expiry. Testing across five major US banks found three distinct policies; Visa Kernel 3 accepted the modified date, while Mastercard, American Express, and Discover kernels declined modified transactions. Findings were disclosed to Visa and affected banks in May 2025, no CVE has been assigned, and no exploitation has been reported.
Google Password Manager Attacks Could Let Malware Hijack Passkey
Unit 42 details three attack paths letting Windows malware silently sign into passkey-protected accounts via Chrome's Google Password Manager without user verification.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 described three post-compromise attack paths—Pass-ta-key, Silver Pass-ta-key and Golden Pass-ta-key—against Chrome's Google Password Manager cloud authenticator on TPM-equipped Windows systems. The attacks can silently obtain valid authentication assertions, install attacker-controlled user-verification keys, or extract the 32-byte Security Domain Secret used to decrypt synced passkey private keys, enabling reusable access from the attacker's own environment. No CVE was assigned and no exploitation in the wild was reported; demonstrations were validated against Chrome 142 and parts of the architecture are corroborated by Chromium source. GitHub enforced the User Verified flag check, while eBay accepted a test assertion lacking it before fixing its validation gap after disclosure.
New Passkey Attacks Can Recover Synced Private Keys or Bypass Phishing
Three research teams showed passkey bypasses: WebAuthn assertion replay in Microsoft Entra ID, synced-passkey key recovery in Google Password Manager, and Windows Hello key reuse.
SpecterOps' Pass-the-Passkey research showed Windows stored past YubiKey signatures in cleartext and chained this with Microsoft Entra ID passkey validation weaknesses to impersonate privileged users despite phishing-resistant MFA; the Windows Event Logging Service issue is tracked as CVE-2026-34348 (CVSS 6.5) and fixed in July 2026 updates. Unit 42's Golden Pass-ta-key attack recovered the 32-byte Security Domain Secret protecting Google Password Manager synced passkeys from Chrome on Windows via pre-existing malware. Dirk-jan Mollema showed in-session malware can use a hardware-bound Windows Hello for Business key without a fresh PIN or biometric check. Microsoft applied Entra-side mitigations for the relay assertion issue; no real-world exploitation has been reported.