diff --git a/haystack/nodes/preprocessor/preprocessor.py b/haystack/nodes/preprocessor/preprocessor.py
index 9dd21978ce..56e6b310bd 100644
--- a/haystack/nodes/preprocessor/preprocessor.py
+++ b/haystack/nodes/preprocessor/preprocessor.py
@@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ def __init__(
             nltk.data.find("tokenizers/punkt")
         except LookupError:
             try:
-                nltk.download("punkt")
+                nltk.download("punkt_tab")
             except FileExistsError as error:
                 logger.debug("NLTK punkt tokenizer seems to be already downloaded. Error message: %s", error)
                 pass
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 42b8acda5a..7f9227e024 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -147,7 +147,7 @@ crawler = [
   "selenium>=4.11.0"
 ]
 preprocessing = [
-  "nltk",
+  "nltk>=3.9",
   "langdetect",  # for language classification
 ]
 file-conversion = [
diff --git a/releasenotes/notes/upgrade-ntlk-1e94de2d6f5dd3b6.yaml b/releasenotes/notes/upgrade-ntlk-1e94de2d6f5dd3b6.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..b17abeb5cf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/releasenotes/notes/upgrade-ntlk-1e94de2d6f5dd3b6.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+fixes:
+  - Upgrades ntlk to 3.9 as prior versions are affect by https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-39705