CVE-2024-3572 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-409 vulnerability in scrapy. A fix is available for scrapy — see the affected versions and patch details below.
XML External Entity (XXE) Vulnerability in scrapy/scrapy
Exploitation Status
Proof-of-concept exploit code exists
- CISA’s SSVC triage found public proof-of-concept exploit code for this CVE, though no confirmed active exploitation.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2024-3572.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2024-3572 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,636 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
scrapy🐍scrapyReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Impact
Scrapy limits allowed response sizes by default through the DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE and DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE settings.
However, those limits were only being enforced during the download of the raw, usually-compressed response bodies, and not during decompression, making Scrapy vulnerable to decompression bombs.
A malicious website being scraped could send a small response that, on decompression, could exhaust the memory available to the Scrapy process, potentially affecting any other process sharing that memory, and affecting disk usage in case of uncompressed response caching.
Patches
Upgrade to Scrapy 2.11.1.
If you are using Scrapy 1.8 or a lower version, and upgrading to Scrapy 2.11.1 is not an option, you may upgrade to Scrapy 1.8.4 instead.
Workarounds
There is no easy workaround.
Disabling HTTP decompression altogether is impractical, as HTTP compression is a rather common practice.
However, it is technically possible to manually backport the 2.11.1 or 1.8.4 fix, replacing the corresponding components of an unpatched version of Scrapy with patched versions copied into your own code.
Acknowledgements
This security issue was reported by @dmandefy through huntr.com.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | scrapy | ≥ 2.0.0&&< 2.11.1 | 2.11.1pip install --upgrade 'scrapy==2.11.1' |
| 🐍PyPI | scrapy | all versions | 1.8.4pip install --upgrade 'scrapy==1.8.4' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for scrapy, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update scrapy to 2.11.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-3572 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2024-3572 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2024-3572. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-3572 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2024-3572 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.