A Critical Bug in a 325M-Download Package Put Millions of AI Agents at Risk (opens in new tab)

One character. That's what it took to bypass authentication on millions of servers running AI agents, MCP tools, and the infrastructure connecting them to user data, email accounts, databases, and in some cases industrial equipment. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and nicknamed BadHost, was found in Starlette, an open-source framework downloaded around 325 million times every week. If you’re building AI infrastructure in Python, there’s a good chance something in your stack d...