Critical WordPress vulnerabilities leave millions of sites open to full takeover

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WordPress patches two flaws: CVE‑2026‑60137 (SQL injection, medium severity) and CVE‑2026‑63030 (REST API batch‑route confusion, critical severity)

When chained, the bugs enabled unauthenticated remote code execution, allowing full site takeover

Admins should urgently upgrade to WordPress 6.9.5 or newer to protect against widespread active attacks

Millions of WordPress websites could be at serious risk, researchers are warning, due to two recently patched vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited in the wild.

WordPress developers released a patch for two vulnerabilities - an SQL injection bug tracked as CVE-2026-60137, and a REST API batch-route confusion bug, tracked as CVE-2026-63030.

The former is a medium-severity, 5.9/10 vulnerability affecting WordPress 6.8.x before 6.8.6, 6.9.x before 6.9.5, and 7.0.x before 7.0.2, while the latter is a critical-severity, 9.8/10 flaw affecting versions 6.9.x before 6.9.5 and 7.0.x before 7.0.2 of the world’s most popular website builder .

Exploitation underway

According to The Register , these bugs are not that dangerous when looked at separately, since they are rather difficult to exploit. However, when chained together, they allow unauthenticated threat actors to execute malicious code remotely, which means full website takeover.

Security researchers at Knott say threat actors picked up on the scent rather quickly.

The patch was released on Friday, but “by the early hours of Saturday morning, successful exploitation was already well underway, initially using public exploit code to exfiltrate hashed credentials, with remote code execution following once additional details were made public,” Knott said.

“From our vantage point across a global client base, we are seeing widespread impact of this vulnerability across organizations of every size and every vertical.”

It is worth mentioning that these vulnerabilities affect WordPress directly, instead of different plugins or themes. WordPress is by far the most popular website builder platform in the world, powering more than half of all websites in existence today.

To protect your assets, make sure to upgrade WordPress to version 6.9.5, since it contains fixes for both flaws.