CVE-2026-14966 is a low-severity (CVSS 3.1) CWE-59 vulnerability in bbot. A fix is available for bbot — see the affected versions and patch details below.
BBOT's Symlink guard bypass in unarchive module allows planting symlinks during extraction
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-14966.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-14966 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
bbotReal-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
BBOT's unarchive module rejects archives containing symlink entries before extraction, but for zip and 7z archives it failed to detect symlinks whose listing carries a DOS-attribute prefix before the unix mode, as produced by legacy versions of p7zip. Such an archive, downloaded and extracted during a scan (for example via filedownload), bypassed the guard and caused an attacker-controlled symlink to be written into the extraction directory. The effect is limited to planting the symlink (its target is not written through), and only hosts using such a legacy p7zip build are affected; current mainline 7-Zip is not.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | bbot | ≥ 2.3.1&&< 3.0.0 | 3.0.0pip install --upgrade 'bbot==3.0.0' |
Affected Products
bbotblacklanternsecurityDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for bbot, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update bbot to 3.0.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-14966 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-14966 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.