What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-49146: App::Ack versions before 3.10.0 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via an unbounded context value in a project .ackrc

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-08 · updated 2026-10-25
• Weakness: CWE-770

Description

App::Ack versions before 3.10.0 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via an unbounded context value in a project .ackrc. ack searches up the directory hierarchy from the current directory for a project .ackrc and loads its options. The -B and -C context options accepted any positive integer, and ack sized the before-context buffer to that value, so a project .ackrc setting --before-context=100000000 made ack allocate a buffer of 100 million elements. A project .ackrc committed to an untrusted repository can abort ack with an out-of-memory condition.

Affected products

• PETDANCE App::Ack: before 3.10.0 — fixed in 3.10.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: PETDANCE App::Ack 3.10.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/beyondgrep/ack3/commit/45ff5fe77dbd96f7332f31943102291f878f30b8.patch
• https://metacpan.org/release/PETDANCE/ack-v3.10.0/source/Changes
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/07/08/8

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