Cyber Security Diaries from StationX
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Cyber Security Diaries from StationX
My AI Hacked a Plugin Running on 4M WordPress Sites | EP 36
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My AI found an admin login bypass in a WordPress security plugin running on 4 million sites, then broke in with no password. Here's the real skill behind it.
I asked HAL, my AI hacking agent, to find a way into a WordPress security plugin installed on 4 million websites. Five AI models from Claude, OpenAI and Google reviewed the code at once, so none of them marked their own homework. Every one independently found the same critical bug. HAL explained it in plain English, then built a working exploit: log in as administrator with no password and no two-factor.
The break-in isn't the point. On its own the AI is unreliable. It misses things, it makes things up, and when you ask it to check its own work it just agrees with itself. What broke into that site was a system I engineered, and the AI models are only one piece plugged into it. That system is the actual skill, and it's learnable. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, calls the discipline agentic engineering. I call what it makes you AI-driven.
CHAPTERS
0:00 AI Hacking Agent Breaks Into WordPress Site
0:19 HAL Finds Bug in 4M-Site WordPress Plugin
1:06 Exploit Demo: Admin Login With No Password
1:47 Why This Isn't a Live Zero-Day Disclosure
2:12 Why LLMs Alone Fail at Hacking
2:46 The Real Skill: Architecting AI Systems
3:37 XBOW Tops HackerOne Bug Bounty Leaderboard
4:20 Agentic Engineering: The New Discipline
4:59 Why AI-Driven Hackers Won't Be Replaced
5:55 Career Paths: Pen Testing, Bug Bounty, Consulting
6:47 How to Bridge Into AI Hacking From IT
7:20 Free Book: Become the Cyber Security Expert
AI-DRIVEN HACKING & SECURITY JOBS (up to $600k)
app.stationx.net/tools/ai-driven-cyber-security-jobs
FREE BOOK
"Become the Cyber Security Expert the AI Era Demands" is free, and it's the fastest way to understand this shift and actually start:
app.stationx.net/book
GO DEEPER
Agentic Engineering, the full explainer:
app.stationx.net/articles/agentic-engineering
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LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/housenathan
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