Executive brief
Quest Bot is an open-source tool used to manage and moderate Discord servers. A flaw in its automated moderation system allows users with certain administrative permissions to inadvertently or maliciously cause the bot to delete every new message sent in the server. This results in a total disruption of communication and community operations until the faulty configuration is manually removed.
Technical details
The 'automod add' command in Quest Bot trims user input but fails to verify if the resulting string is empty. If a user provides only whitespace, an empty string is stored in the database as a forbidden word. The message listener component uses the JavaScript 'content.includes()' method to check incoming messages against the forbidden list; since any string includes an empty string, the condition evaluates to true for every message. This leads to the immediate deletion of all guild messages by the bot. The vulnerability requires 'Manage Guild' permissions to exploit and has been patched in version 1.1.6.
Affected products
- duck-organization Quest Bot < 1.1.6
Timeline
- 2026-05-18: advisory: GitHub Security Advisory published
- 2026-05-21: patched: Version 1.1.6 released
- 2026-06-12: disclosed: CVE published to NVD