CONFERENCE Watch Now: Threat Detection & Incident Response (TDIR) Summit - Watch Event On-Demand
Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Vulnerabilities

Zerodium Offering $300,000 for WordPress Exploits

Exploit acquisition company Zerodium announced last week that it’s temporarily offering $300,000 for high-impact WordPress exploits.

Exploit acquisition company Zerodium announced last week that it’s temporarily offering $300,000 for high-impact WordPress exploits.

The firm is looking for exploits that can be used to achieve remote code execution. The exploit must work on default configurations running the latest version of WordPress, it needs to target WordPress itself and not third-party plugins, and it must not require any authentication or user interaction.

Zerodium is prepared to pay out up to $300,000 per exploit. The company typically offers $100,000 for WordPress RCE exploits, the same amount as for Webmin, Plesk, and cPanel/WHM exploits.

Zerodium offering bigger payouts for WordPress RCE exploits

Zerodium claims its customers are government organizations — mainly from North America and Europe — that seek “advanced zero-day exploits and cybersecurity capabilities.”

“At ZERODIUM we take ethics very seriously and we chose our customers very carefully, which means that access to your research and exploits will be highly restricted and limited to a very small number of institutional customers,” the company says on its website.

Exploit brokers like Zerodium are often controversial due to the possibility that they could sell their services — some of them have been caught doing so — to oppressive regimes that are likely to use them to identify and silence their critics. However, to date, there have been no reports of Zerodium offering its services to such regimes.

Currently, Zerodium offers the highest payouts for remote code execution exploits targeting Windows ($1 million), and exploits that can give a remote attacker full control of mobile devices ($2.5 million for Android and $2 million for iOS).

It’s not uncommon for the company to temporarily increase payouts for certain exploits — likely if there is a big demand — but the company is also known to stop buying certain types of exploits altogether due to surplus.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Related: Jailbreak Tool Updated to Unlock iPhones Running iOS 13.5

Related: Increased Focus on iOS Hacking Leads to Drop in Exploit Prices

Related: Zerodium Expects iOS Exploit Prices to Drop as It Announces Surplus

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this event as we dive into threat hunting tools and frameworks, and explore value of threat intelligence data in the defender’s security stack.

Register

Learn how integrating BAS and Automated Penetration Testing empowers security teams to quickly identify and validate threats, enabling prompt response and remediation.

Register

People on the Move

Jeremy Koppen has left Mandiant after 13 years to become the CISO of Equifax.

Engineering and technology solutions provider Amentum has appointed Max Shier as its CISO.

PAM provider Keeper Security has appointed Shane Barney as its Chief Information Security Officer.

More People On The Move

Expert Insights

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest cybersecurity news, threats, and expert insights. Unsubscribe at any time.