Medium · published September 24, 2026
PyMongo's connection string parsing decodes percent-encoded characters in the host portion before the host list is separated on its delimiters. When an application places a hostname value supplied by an unauthenticated party into a connection string, that party may cause additional servers of their choosing to be added to the application's database client. The application may then send its authentication exchange and database operations to one of those servers, which can observe limited information and return altered results.