CVE-2026-50023: Yt-Dlp Project Yt-Dlp

Critical severity, CVSS 9.6. EPSS: 0.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

yt-dlp is a command-line audio/video downloader. Prior to 2026.06.09, a vulnerability exists in yt-dlp that allows a remote attacker to write arbitrary OS-shortcut files (such as .desktop, .url, .webloc) to the user's filesystem, bypassing the remediation for CVE-2024-38519. The allowlist explicitly included the unsafe extensions .desktop, .url, and .webloc so that the functionality of the --write-link option (and its variants) could be preserved. These allowlist inclusions can be exploited by an attacker to write malicious OS-shortcut files in the context of a media or subtitles download. This vulnerability is fixed in 2026.06.09.

Affected products

Published 2026-06-23. Last modified 2026-06-26.