What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-23842: ChatterBot has Denial of Service via Database Connection Pool Exhaustion

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2026-01-19 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

ChatterBot is a machine learning, conversational dialog engine for creating chat bots. ChatterBot versions up to 1.2.10 are vulnerable to a denial-of-service condition caused by improper database session and connection pool management. Concurrent invocations of the get_response() method can exhaust the underlying SQLAlchemy connection pool, resulting in persistent service unavailability and requiring a manual restart to recover. Version 1.2.11 fixes the issue.

Affected products

• gunthercox ChatterBot: before 1.2.11 — fixed in 1.2.11

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: gunthercox ChatterBot 1.2.11. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/commit/de89fe648139f8eeacc998ad4524fab291a378cf
• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/pull/2432
• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/releases/tag/1.2.11
• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/security/advisories/GHSA-v4w8-49pv-mf72
• https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4ee845c4-b847-4854-84ec-4b2fb2f7090f

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