wp2shell

Using an LLM for assurance (WP2SHELL)

What better way to test than to eat ones own dogfood right! This site runs WordPress, it is fronted by Cloudflare, has wordfence and has automatic patching enabled (the default) in WordPress. So what better example to show that we can use an LLM + LLM created scripts to conduct assurance activities. This is mixing deterministic and non deterministic technologies to test and then assess.

Vulnerabilities

WP2SHELL Update

This morning I’ve started to see exploitation attempts on pwndefend.com (they all failed because like about 80% of sites (based on sampling) this site automatically patched, but also, this site has word fence, is fronted by Cloudflare.

Global Exposure

On the 18th (AM) I did sampling of about 3.5K hosts and found ~20% were not patched. The cyber apocalypse is not seemingly here today! (let alone the fact that if every WordPress site was popped, the world would probably not end)

Threat Intel

Yesterday afternoon/early evening a patch for WordPress was released (7.0.2) which address two vulnerabilities which are named: WP2SHELL. This is a fast post (largely generated by Claude Opus) to provide some detail. For reference in our research we have found ~20% of WordPress sites still vulnerable as of a few hours ago (based on a sample), so this is a live scenario and it would be strongly advisable for organisations to take appropriate steps. This morning I’ve built a docker lab of a vulnerable WordPress site and demonstrated hash theft and web shell deployment to a vulnerable lab instance.

I’ve put some resources for people (use at own risk) into a repo: https://github.com/mr-r3b00t/wp2shell/

that includes a scanner, some info on the vulns and a PoC tool!