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An AI Model Found the WordPress Flaw in Ten Hours for $25. Attackers Weaponized the Patch in Ninety Minutes.
by Natalia Nowak<br>·<br>August 7, 2026<br>·<br>Security<br>·<br>8 min read
WordPress released 7.0.3 on August 6, a security release the core team recommends installing immediately. Its headline entry is a pre-auth reflected cross-site scripting flaw on the login screen that can lead to PHP code execution, reported by the team at pwn.ai and tracked as CVE-2026-64638.
It is the second such release in three weeks, and the two numbers that bracket the first one matter more than either release. According to Patchstack, the critical chain fixed in 7.0.2 on July 17 was not found by a researcher reading the batch API line by line: Searchlight Cyber pointed an OpenAI model at WordPress core and had a working pre-auth SQL injection chained to remote code execution in ten hours, at a cost of about $25 . After 7.0.2 shipped, the first exploitation attempts hit Patchstack’s sensors roughly 90 minutes later , three hours after the fix was committed to WordPress trunk. Both ends of the vulnerability lifecycle have compressed at once, and hosting companies occupy the space in between.
Key facts
Discovery: per Patchstack, a model produced the working chain in ten hours for roughly $25 ; WordPress.org credits Adam Kues at Assetnote and Searchlight Cyber for the report
Exploitation: the first attempts landed 90 minutes after 7.0.2 was released , which was three hours after the fix was committed to trunk ; over the following days Patchstack blocked more than 65,000 attempts from over 1,500 addresses
Mitigation: Patchstack found that nearly every WAF rule published in the first hours was bypassable , including its own, because the rules matched on the request URL and WordPress accepts the same route from the POST body
Volume: WordPress security reports through HackerOne ran in the dozens per month for nine years and reached 450 in July , according to figures from core security lead John Blackbourn published by Patchstack
The July 17 timeline, measured from the moment the fix was committed to WordPress trunk, 1.5 hours before the release went out. Source: Patchstack telemetry.
Ten Hours and Twenty-Five Dollars
Patchstack names the model: OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra , run against WordPress core by Searchlight Cyber. WordPress.org’s own release notes credit the resulting report to Adam Kues at Assetnote and Searchlight Cyber, which corroborates who found the flaw, though not the method or the price.
The August release points the same way. Two of its fixes are credited to companies built around AI: the login screen flaw to pwn.ai , which works on autonomous penetration testing, and an Author-level CSS injection to Anthropic . As Patchstack frames the shift, AI-assisted research used to mean a human researcher with a very fast assistant; now the model finds the flaw and carries it to exploitation, and the researcher’s job is to file the report.
The intake numbers show the volume that produces. Reports reaching WordPress through HackerOne, covering core, WordPress.org infrastructure and official plugins, ran at dozens per month for nine years, began climbing this spring and hit 450 in July , according to data from core security lead John Blackbourn published in Patchstack’s advisory.
None of that is bad news in itself, and Patchstack is careful to say so: more eyes on an open source codebase, moving faster, is a long-term gain. The consequence is about timing rather than merit. If a model can go from a standing start to working remote code execution in ten hours, the assumption that defenders have days between disclosure and exploitation no longer describes the world.
Ninety Minutes to a Live Campaign
The other end compressed too. The 7.0.2 problem was a two-part chain: a SQL injection in WP_Query reachable through the author_exclude parameter (CVE-2026-60137, affecting WordPress 6.8 through 7.0.1) plus a route and handler confusion in the REST API batch endpoint (CVE-2026-63030, affecting 6.9 through 7.0.1). Neither is a takeover alone. Chained, they let an unauthenticated request smuggle the injection past the schema that would normally sanitize it, and the published exploit walks from there to a new administrator and code execution. WordPress.org considered the severity high enough to enable forced updates through the auto-update system.
The two figures around that release describe the same moment from different starting points. The fix landed in WordPress trunk about 1.5 hours before 7.0.2 was tagged , and Patchstack treats that commit as the effective disclosure, because anyone watching core development can diff it and see exactly what changed. The first attempts arrived 90 minutes after the release, three hours after the commit...