CVE-2026-44496
HIGHCVE-2026-44496 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in axios. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2026-44496 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Axios: Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via Cookie Name Injection
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-2026-44496.
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-2026-44496 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 0 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
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
axiosnpmDescription
Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Axios versions before 0.32.0 on the 0.x line and before 1.16.0 on the 1.x line build a regular expression from the configured XSRF cookie name without escaping regex metacharacters. In standard browser environments, an attacker who can influence the cookie name passed to axios can cause expensive regex backtracking while axios reads document.cookie. The practical impact is client-side availability degradation, such as freezing the affected browser tab while axios prepares a request. The issue does not affect ordinary Node.js HTTP adapter usage, React Native, or web workers, where axios does not read document.cookie. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.32.0 and 1.16.0.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | axios | ≥ 1.0.0&&< 1.16.0 | 1.16.0 |
| 📦npm | axios | all versions | 0.32.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for axios. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update axios to 1.16.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-44496 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 pinpoints whether CVE-2026-44496 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2026-44496. 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.
This Important flaw in Axios can lead to a client-side Denial of Service. An attacker capable of influencing the XSRF cookie name within a browser environment could trigger excessive regular expression processing, causing the affected browser tab to freeze and degrade user availability. This issue specifically impacts…
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-44496 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2026-44496 across npm dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.