CVE-2026-115866
Tenable Plugin
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AI Threat Summary
CVE-2026-115866 is a moderate vulnerability affecting the target software. Threat hunters should monitor for exploit attempts and apply vendor patches immediately.
Description
Starlet versions from 0.20 before 0.33 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via regular expression backtracking when decoding chunked request bodies. A chunk-size line is matched as a run of hex digits, then .* and a CRLF. A run followed by a bare LF and then a CRLF can never match, and the engine retries the match once for each digit, so the time taken grows with the square of the run length. Nothing limits the length of the run, which can span several reads. A remote attacker can occupy a worker for about a minute of CPU time with one 128 KiB request, before the application is called.
Attack Chain
Attacker scans for vulnerable versions using version banners or PoC scanners
Attacker triggers CVE-2026-115866 vulnerability with a crafted request or payload
Vulnerability exploited to perform unauthorized actions on the target system
Depending on vulnerability type, attacker achieves data access, service disruption, or code execution
MITRE ATT&CK Techniques
Indicators of Compromise
| Type | Value | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| user_agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; exploit/1.0) |
Generic exploit scanner user agent pattern | |
| url | /api/vuln-endpoint?payload=<malicious> |
Exploit attempt against application endpoint — monitor access logs for anomalous params |
Remediation
Quick Facts
| CVE ID | CVE-2026-115866 |
| CVSS Score | N/A |
| Published | 2026-10-30 |
| Exploited | No |
| CISA KEV | No |
| PoC | Not public |