Article URL: https://slcyber.io/research-center/exploit-brokers-pay-500000-for-a-wordpress-rce-i-found-one-with-gpt5-6/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975665…

If you’re running WordPress and want to check if your instance is vulnerable, you can use our tool we’ve hosted here: https://wp2shell.com/. We held off on publishing this issue to give defenders a chance to upgrade their WordPress instances over the weekend, but during that time, Calif and Hacktron were able to independently reproduce the full chain before other PoCs surfaced on GitHub. Like most security researchers, we follow the new model releases at Searchlight Cyber very closely. When GPT5.6 Sol Ultra was released, we were very excited to test it out. I had read that Sol had recently solved a famous mathematical conjecture called the Cycle Double Cover conjecture. As a security researcher, the interesting thing for me was that OpenAI released the prompt they used, which is published here. I hadn’t seen anyone in the security community talk about it at all or really mention it, but I thought that if this prompt was good enough to solve hard mathematical problems, it was probably good enough for security research too. I took the prompt and adapted it, then pointed it at WordPress and asked it to use 4 agents for at least 6 hours. Here is the exact prompt I landed on: Before starting, I cloned the latest stable WordPress release into main/ and removed the .git directory. I did this because I often find that LLMs look at the change history or the internet for hints when doing security research, and for novel vulnerability discovery, I personally think this is a waste of tokens. This is also why I added this line: My experience has also been that models will sometimes ‘cheat’ to achieve what you ask, either by choosing extremely unlikely configuration options or by fabricating preconditions that aren’t achievable by an attacker. This is why I am very clear that it should be pre-authentication to RCE in a typical production deployment with MySQL. Finally, I have found that models don’t really ‘get into the weeds’ with the underlying libraries if they need to. Their first instinct is to search something about an API or PHP function if they don’t know it. But models are really good at reading source code, so I just ask them to read the source: When I came back, I saw in its running output that it claimed to have discovered a pre-authentication SQL injection. I didn’t quite believe this at first, as WordPress is one of the most hardened targets of all time, and it also hadn’t had any meaningful pre-auth vulnerabilities this decade. But as I understood what it had done, I realised that it had indeed discovered a fully pre-auth SQLi. Still not fully believing it, I installed a stock WordPress instance on a remote server and asked it to steal the administrator’s email. Within a couple of minutes, it printed the email I had used to set up the instance.