Vulnerability · Published Jul 9, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2026-58198ChatterBot: Symlink-Following Arbitrary Write via UbuntuCorpusTrainer

Medium 5.5

In plain English

A medium-severity security flaw in ChatterBot from gunthercox. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.1% (higher than 3% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.5Medium

Exploit odds (30 days)0.1%top 96.7% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: poc

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

ChatterBot is a machine learning, conversational dialog engine for creating chat bots. Prior to 1.2.14, UbuntuCorpusTrainer.extract() uses a predictable home-rooted output directory (~/ubuntu_data/ubuntu_dialogs) with a check-then-create pattern followed by tar.extractall(path=self.data_path), allowing a local attacker who pre-plants a symlink at the predictable path to cause archive contents to be written through the symlink to an attacker-chosen directory. This issue is fixed in version 1.2.14.

Affected packages & fixed versions

Ecosystem	Package	Fixed in	Advisory
PyPI	chatterbot	1.2.14	GHSA-wvrh-2f4m-924v

Affected products (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
gunthercox	ChatterBot	< 1.2.14

Weakness: CWE-367, CWE-59 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

References

https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/security/advisories/GHSA-wvrh-2f4m-924v x_refsource_CONFIRM
https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/pull/2445 x_refsource_MISC
https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/commit/82817b5c28bfd43e682b991bcc76e6f780726dbf x_refsource_MISC
https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/releases/tag/1.2.14 x_refsource_MISC