CVE-2026-66393

high

Assigned by CNA: vulncheck

Published 2026-08-22 · Modified 2026-08-22

Discuss on Community Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

7.5

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

8.7

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

VIR risk

7.5

Description

NLTK versions before 3.9.4 contain an unbounded recursion vulnerability in JSONTaggedDecoder.decode_obj() that allows attackers to cause denial of service by supplying deeply nested JSON structures. Attackers can craft JSON payloads exceeding the recursion limit to trigger an unhandled RecursionError that crashes the Python process.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

83%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

CWEs

CWE-674

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.