The Growing Exploit Economy
Exploit brokers are paying upwards of $500,000 for zero-day WordPress RCEs. The market for unpatched vulnerabilities has matured into a sophisticated ecosystem with clear pricing tiers, SLAs, and even arbitration mechanisms. What was once a shadowy corner of the security world is now operating with surprising transparency.
AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery
Using GPT-5.6 and a $25 budget, I was able to identify a previously unknown RCE vector in a popular WordPress plugin. The process involved feeding the AI the plugin source code and asking it to trace data flow from user input to dangerous PHP functions. The model identified a deserialization path that had been overlooked during manual audits.
Implications for the Ecosystem
The democratization of vulnerability research through AI tools lowers the barrier to entry dramatically. While this enables more security researchers to find bugs, it also means malicious actors have access to the same capabilities. Plugin authors need to adopt automated static analysis in their CI pipelines and treat AI-assisted auditing as a baseline threat model.