What 45 Million wp2shell Exploit Attempts Reveal About the New Vulnerability Response Window

The latest wp2shell vulnerability was one of the biggest WordPress security events in history. The critical vulnerability chain combined two flaws that allowed unauthenticated attackers to exploit vulnerable sites and ultimately execute malicious code remotely, potentially taking control of them.

In the first week after the disclosure, more than 45 million exploit attempts from nearly 150,000 unique network sources were made. And as the volume continued climbing, we saw just how fast vulnerability disclosure can turn into mass exploitation. For comparison, this scale was roughly 20x what was observed during Drupalgeddon, illustrating how much automated attack capacity has increased.

Coming off the incident, we shouldn’t be looking at the vulnerability alone, but at how little time defenders now have between disclosure and widespread exploitation.