Cloudflare WAF protects WordPress applications from two high-severity vulnerabilities

Cloudflare has deployed new Web Application Firewall (WAF) protections for two critical vulnerabilities affecting WordPress. The protections address an Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in WordPress's REST API and a related SQL Injection vulnerability.

The WordPress security team disclosed the vulnerabilities to Cloudflare before public release so that we could prepare protections for customers. Cloudflare has deployed the new rules to protect all customers, including those on free and paid plans, as long as their application traffic is proxied through the Cloudflare WAF. The rules were deployed at 17:03 UTC on July 17 2026.

WAF protections reduce exposure while customers update, but they are not a substitute for patching. WordPress has released fixes in version 7.0.2, with backports to affected earlier branches: 6.9.5, 6.8.6, and 7.1 Beta 2 ( see release details ). Versions earlier than 6.8 are not affected. WordPress is treating this as its highest-severity, highest-priority class of issue and is forcing automatic updates to affected sites, so most sites will be updated automatically. We still recommend confirming that you are on a patched release or the backports for your branch and follow the guidance in the official WordPress security release announcement.

What you need to know

The vulnerabilities affect different parts of the request path:

CVE-2026-60137: SQL injection. A vulnerability in WordPress version 6.8 and later allows crafted input to alter a database query. Rating High.

CVE-2026-63030: Unauthenticated remote code execution. A vulnerability in WordPress version 6.9 and later allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute code through the batch endpoint of the REST API when a persistent object cache is not in use. This vulnerability is related to the SQL injection described above. No login or user interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability. Rating Critical.

The SQL injection vulnerability is present from versio…