CVE-2026-33236

Medium

Elevated severity or exploit probability.

CVSS base

8.1 HIGH

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

EPSS — probability of exploitation (30 days)

0.6%

46.1th percentile

CISA KEV

Not listed

Weakness / dates

CWE-22

Published 2026-03-20 · modified 2026-07-21

CVSS breakdown

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

Attack Vector	N	Network
Attack Complexity	L	Low
Privileges Required	N	None
User Interaction	R	Required
Scope	U	Unchanged
Confidentiality	N	None
Integrity	H	High
Availability	H	High

Timeline

2026-03-20 — Published (NVD)
2026-07-21 — Last modified (NVD)

Description

NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a suite of open source Python modules, data sets, and tutorials supporting research and development in Natural Language Processing. In versions 3.9.3 and prior, the NLTK downloader does not validate the `subdir` and `id` attributes when processing remote XML index files. Attackers can control a remote XML index server to provide malicious values containing path traversal sequences (such as `../`), which can lead to arbitrary directory creation, arbitrary file creation, and arbitrary file overwrite. Commit 89fe2ec2c6bae6e2e7a46dad65cc34231976ed8a patches the issue.

Affected

nltk

References

Official: NVD · CVE.org