WordPress Comment2Shell Flaw Can Turn Anonymous Comment XSS Into RCE via Admin Session
Sep 22, 2026
Vulnerability / Web Security
A new flaw in WordPress core let an anonymous visitor leave a comment that planted a hidden script on the page. If a logged-in administrator later opened that page, the script could run code on the site's server. WordPress fixed the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-93485 and called " Comment2Shell ," on September 17 in version 7.1.1 and told site owners to update right away. There is no sign it has been used in attacks, and it is not on the U.S. government's list of actively exploited software flaws. Patchstack, the company that assigned that identifier, rated the flaw 7.1 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. WordPress checks a comment for dangerous HTML when it is saved, then reformats it when the page is shown, and the flaw sat in the gap between those two steps. Rafie Muhammad, the security researcher who reported the bug, laid out the full chain in a write-up on September 21. The trick was a line break placed inside the attribute of an allowed HTML tag ...