Wordfence has seen more than 170 live exploit attempts against CVE-2026-3844, a critical unauthenticated arbitrary file upload in the Breeze Cache WordPress plugin from Cloudways. Breeze has roughly 400,000 active installations, making this one of the larger exposure events of the month. The flaw lives in the fetch_gravatar_from_remote function, which fetches avatar images from an arbitrary remote URL and saves them locally without validating the downloaded file's MIME type - so an attacker can point it at a .php payload and drop a webshell directly into a web-accessible directory. The attack is only possible when the 'Host Files Locally - Gravatars' add-on is enabled, which is not the default, but any site that turned it on for performance reasons is wide open. Cloudways shipped the fix as Breeze 2.4.5 earlier this week; as of publication only about 138,000 of the 400,000 installations had downloaded the patched version, leaving hundreds of thousands of sites exposed to a pre-auth RCE with 9.8 CVSS.
One of the most methodical WordPress supply chain attacks ever: a buyer known only as 'Kris' purchased the entire Essential Plugin portfolio (30+ free WordPress plugins) on the Flippa marketplace for six figures. In August 2025, they injected a PHP deserialization backdoor in version 2.6.7, disguised as a compatibility check for WordPress 6.8.2. The malicious code sat dormant for eight months, building trust. On April 5-6, 2026, the attacker activated it - the C2 domain analytics.essentialplugin[.]com began distributing payloads to every site running the compromised plugins. The backdoor injected cloaked SEO spam into wp-config.php, visible only to Googlebot. WordPress.org permanently closed all 31 plugins on April 7 and pushed a forced auto-update - but the cleanup only removed the phone-home code, not the wp-config.php modifications, meaning compromised sites still served spam after the 'fix'. This happened the same week as the Smart Slider 3 supply chain attack we reported April 11 - two different supply chain attacks via the WordPress trusted update channel in one week.
Attackers compromised Nextend's update infrastructure and pushed a fully weaponized version of Smart Slider 3 Pro (3.5.1.35) through the official WordPress and Joomla update channel on April 7. Sites with auto-updates enabled received a multi-layered remote access toolkit disguised as a legitimate plugin update. The malicious version was live for approximately six hours before detection. Patchstack's analysis found: unauthenticated remote command execution via crafted HTTP headers, a second authenticated backdoor with PHP eval and OS command execution, a hidden administrator account (prefixed wpsvc_) invisible in the admin interface, persistent backdoors planted in the active theme's functions.php and wp-config.php, and automated credential theft sent to an external server. Traditional defenses like firewalls, nonce verification, and role-based access controls are irrelevant here because the malicious code arrived through the trusted update channel. Affected sites should be considered fully compromised.
A critical vulnerability in the Ninja Forms File Uploads premium add-on for WordPress allows attackers to upload arbitrary files - including PHP web shells - without any authentication. Over 800,000 WordPress sites use Ninja Forms, and the File Uploads extension is one of its most popular premium add-ons. Successful exploitation gives an attacker full code execution on the web server. No user interaction required - just a crafted request to the file upload endpoint.
A flaw in Smart Slider 3 - one of WordPress's most popular slider plugins with over 800,000 active installations - lets anyone with a basic subscriber account download arbitrary files from the server. That includes wp-config.php, which contains database credentials, encryption keys, and salt data. An attacker only needs the lowest level of authenticated access to trigger the vulnerable export function and package sensitive files into a downloadable ZIP.
TrustStrike Labs