education – PwnDefend

From TimThumb to wp2shell: 25 Years of WordPress Mass…

TL;DR: wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030 chained with CVE-2026-60137) matters because it is a core, pre-authentication RCE reachable on a stock, plugin-free install. That is the rare category. In 25 years, unauthenticated code execution against a bare WordPress install has happened only a handful of times. The overwhelming majority of WordPress mass compromise has ridden the plugin and theme supply chain and infrastructure abuse, not core. This post maps the history so you can see where wp2shell actually sits.

How do LLMs work?

Ok full disclosure, because you know I like to say when I’m using ‘AI’, this post is specifically mostly created by an LLM. Because it’s an interesting experiment and I don’t claim to be an ‘AI’ model creation and platform expert, so let’s see if using an LLM can help me! I was in a meeting along time ago at MS Victoria with some people (can’t imagine what types of people that would be) and we were talking about this tech, it was so long ago I can’t remember the details or anyones faces (useful that)… but the convo was really good, anyway, so what is an LLM and how does it work?

Threat Intel

Bleeding Out

When you compromise a firewall you have lots of options in terms of next steps, from using the VPN, changing configurations, creating backdoors or perhaps using the firewall to PCAP. In this post I’m going to explore the ‘Fortibleed’ campaign. I have to note, we can see in honeypot logs this TA did not seem to limit themselves to Fortinet exploitation, however the area of analysis has a heavy Fortinet element. You will see they deployed a capture and analysis platform. Treat everything with a pinch of salt because I’m using a mad probability based machine (LLM) to support me for this!

Education

Who needs Mythos anyway! Vulnerability ‘fun’ with Unifi

Last night I found a disturbance in the cyber force… a premise that said 3x CVEs (which the vendor scored at 10.0) were alleged to not be 3 routes… this made no sense to me, why would a vendor release 3 CVEs with the MAXIMUM Score (see my last blog) which means: someone can remotely execute code/read data (remember if you leak key materials you can then craft a way to log in so you can get execution in more than one way). So I set off on mission to try and fix the problem; someone might have said something wrong on the internet!

Vulnerabilities

CVSS Scoring is fun they said!

Ok, fun things to learn about me, I don’t like CVEs or CVSS because my brain can’t really read them! I have the same challenge with some server naming standards. I need something like SRV-UK-ADDS-01 if it’s not goy hyphens I need a tool to read them for me! (true story!). So lets look at CVSS (I know I’m full of fun topics).

Leadership

Email Security: An Enablement Journey, Not a Maturity Ladder

Most organizations treat email authentication as a checkbox exercise. Deploy SPF, publish DMARC in reporting mode, call it done. But the real story isn’t about maturity tiers—it’s about what you unlock at each phase of implementation. And frankly, the gap between where organizations are and where they need to be is brutal.

This post outlines an enablement journey: each phase builds on the previous one and creates new capabilities that weren’t possible before.

Research

The State of DNS Security — Where the Top…

A position snapshot of the full Majestic Million across three layers — DNSSEC signing, email authentication (SPF / DMARC / MTA-STS), and DANE. This is the scorecard: what is deployed, on how many domains, and how it’s distributed by rank and TLD. Remember Majestic Million is a bit old so a chunk of the domains no longer resolve, but the data gives a good thematic view.

Leadership

DNSSEC

‘You are totally compromised!’ because you don’t have DNSSEC configured on domain…..

The implication is that you’re one packet away from catastrophe. It’s alarming. It’s also, for the overwhelming majority of organisations, not true. I have been talking about this for years and years!

Here’s the quickest way to see through it. I scanned the Majestic Million – the top one million domains on the internet – for DNSSEC. About 6.75% were signed (around 8.2% if you only count domains that actually resolve). The .com zone, which is half the list, sits at 4.6%. And the unsigned set includes google.com, amazon.com and microsoft.com.

So if “no DNSSEC” means “totally compromised,” then the three most-attacked, best-defended companies on the planet are totally compromised, and have been for years, on purpose. They aren’t. The finding is measuring conformance to a checklist, not risk. Let’s understand why this is!

Using AI in a positive (non scary) way

Do you ever struggle to keep up with the cyber world? Not everyone is plugged into the internet 24/7 as some people (I swear I get offline sometimes!) so keeping up to date with the cyber world can be pretty tricky! Also who has time to read everything? no one that’s who! But what about if we used an LLM to read things for us and then give us an update? Well here’s an example of this!

Threat Intel

Administrator:password

Imagine this, you setup a server and it has a really weak administrator password! Now let’s imagine you expose RDP to the internet. How long would it take to get pw3nd?

Well we did this, using a custom configuration to make this safe, we setup a Windows Server, setup an administrator account with the password of ‘password’ and monitored the logs! So let’s see what we found.