WordPress attacks began within hours of a critical security fix
This is a DailyCyber.News update, brought to you by BareMetalCyber.com, for Thursday, September 24th, 2026.
Website operators faced active probing less than five hours after WordPress released its security patch. The activity didn’t remain limited to reconnaissance. Attack traffic increased tenfold, and attackers began writing files that could execute shell commands when someone accessed them. The underlying issue allows unauthenticated local file inclusion and can lead to remote code execution when the server configuration and active theme meet certain conditions.
WordPress fixed the problem in version 7.1.2 and backported security updates to supported branches through 4.7. Releases before 4.6 won’t receive a fix, so operators of very old sites face an upgrade problem rather than a normal patch task. Public websites on vulnerable hosting configurations could be taken over, disrupted, or used to expose data. Leaders should treat delayed website maintenance as direct business exposure. Defenders should update immediately and review web, application, and temporary-directory logs for the attack stages already observed. The larger lesson is that exploitation can begin faster than routine change processes finish. Update WordPress immediately and investigate vulnerable sites for file writes or command execution rather than assuming patching ended the risk.
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