NLTK before 3.10.0 (affected versions <= 3.9.4) contains a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the validatenetworkurl() function in nltk/pathsec.py. The resolvehostname() helper catches OSError and ValueError during socket.getaddrinfo() and returns an empty list; when DNS resolution fails, the validation loop executes no IP checks and the function fails open, allowing urlopen() to proceed without validation. An attacker who can trigger DNS resolution failures or use DNS rebinding can bypass SSRF protections and reach restricted network resources, including cloud metadata endpoints (e.g., 169.254.169.254).