How a viral AI agent OpenClaw with 85,000 GitHub stars became the scariest thing on my Shodan dashboard — and probably yours too. How a viral AI agent OpenClaw with 85,000 GitHub stars became the scariest thing on my Shodan dashboard — and probably yours too. I ran product:openclaw on Shodan last week on a Tuesday afternoon, mostly out of curiosity. 28,598 results. I stared at the number for a minute. Then I started clicking through them. Open admin panels. Plaintext API keys sitting in config dumps. That’s why I decided to write this blogpost. product:openclaw If you haven't heard of ClawdBot yet; What actually is ClawdBot? ClawdBot (which has since been renamed twice, first to MoltBot and then to OpenClaw, because Anthropic sent them a trademark nastygram) is an open-source AI agent. Not a chatbot. An agent. The distinction matters.  It connects to an LLM (usually Claude, ironically) and gives it hands. It can execute shell commands on your machine. Read and write files. Authenticate to your Slack, your Telegram, your email. Browse the web. Send messages as you. And it remembers everything across sessions, because it has persistent memory. The project describes itself as "the AI that actually does things." Which is accurate. That is exactly the problem. Under the hood there are two pieces that matter. Gateway is a long-running background process that handles message routing, talks to the LLM, stores credentials, and executes whatever tools the agent decides to use. Gateway Control panel is a web admin interface where you configure integrations, manage API keys, read conversation logs, and approve devices. Control panel If you've ever set up a self-hosted Gitea or Jenkins instance, the deployment pattern will feel familiar. Spin up a service, stick Nginx in front of it, open a port, move on. Except this service has your Anthropic API key, your Slack OAuth tokens, your Telegram bot credentials, and the ability to run arbitrary commands with whatever privileges you gave it.  I genuinely don't understand why the default install doesn't force you to set a password. But here we are. 28,598 Open Doors This is the part that kept me up. I see 28,598 results on my shodan search. I've personally checked maybe 40 or 50 of them. Some are locked down. A lot aren't. The Control interface has a pretty obvious HTTP fingerprint. Unique HTML strings, recognizable static assets. Kind of thing that takes about 10 minutes to build a Shodan dork for: product:openclaw product:openclaw Or for the older deployments that haven't updated: title:"Clawdbot Control" title:"Clawdbot Control" Now, what does an attacker actually get if they find one of these? Even read-only access is rough. Config pages regularly expose Anthropic API keys, Telegram bot tokens, Slack OAuth secrets, and device-pairing metadata. Conversation histories go back months. Private messages, file attachments, the works. If you're running OpenClaw right now: go check. Bind the gateway to `localhost`. Set `gateway.auth.password`. Verify your reverse proxy is actually passing real client IPs. And for the love of all that is holy, monitor your own IP ranges on Shodan. The localhost trick (or: how your reverse proxy betrays you) So here's the fun part. ClawdBot has a device authentication system. Challenge-response, cryptographic, the whole deal. Sounds good on paper. But connections from `localhost` get auto-approved. It's a developer convenience thing. Makes sense during local testing. Terrible in production.And the failure mode is exactly what you'd predict if you've ever spent time debugging Nginx configs at 2am. When the gateway sits behind a reverse proxy on the same host — which is how basically everyone deploys it — external traffic shows up as coming from `127.0.0.1` unless you explicitly configure trusted proxy headers. The gateway sees localhost. Auth is bypassed. The entire internet just became a trusted device. I've seen this exact pattern in Jenkins setups, in Grafana deployments, in half a dozen self-hosted tools over the years. The twist here is that bypassing auth on ClawdBot doesn't just give you a dashboard. It gives you an autonomous agent with stored credentials and shell access. Tenable found three CVEs (https://www.tenable.com/blog/agentic-ai-security-how-to-mitigate-clawdbot-moltbot-openclaw-vulnerabilities) related to this: CVE-2026-25253 (chains two bugs for full RCE), CVE-2026-24763 and CVE-2026-25157 (command injection). These are not theoretical. Patches exist. Apply them. Here's what a properly hardened Nginx config looks like for this: https://www.tenable.com/blog/agentic-ai-security-how-to-mitigate-clawdbot-moltbot-openclaw-vulnerabilities https://www.tenable.com/blog/agentic-ai-security-how-to-mitigate-clawdbot-moltbot-openclaw-vulnerabilities server {

 listen 443 ssl;

 server_name your-openclaw.example.com;

 ssl_certificate      /etc/ssl/certs/openclaw.pem; 
 ssl_certificate_key      /etc/ssl/private/openclaw.key; 
 
 # Only allow traffic from your VPN or known networks 
 allow      10.0.0.0/8; 
 allow      192.168.1.0/24; 
 deny all; 
 
 location / {
     proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:3000;     
     
     # THIS IS THE PART PEOPLE FORGET 
     # Without these headers, every connection looks like localhost 

     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; 
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; 
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; 
     proxy_set_header Host $host; 
     }
} server {

 listen 443 ssl;

 server_name your-openclaw.example.com;

 ssl_certificate      /etc/ssl/certs/openclaw.pem; 
 ssl_certificate_key      /etc/ssl/private/openclaw.key; 
 
 # Only allow traffic from your VPN or known networks 
 allow      10.0.0.0/8; 
 allow      192.168.1.0/24; 
 deny all; 
 
 location / {
     proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:3000;     
     
     # THIS IS THE PART PEOPLE FORGET 
     # Without these headers, every connection looks like localhost 

     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; 
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; 
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; 
     proxy_set_header Host $host; 
     }
} The X-Forwarded-For and X-Real-IP headers are the whole ballgame. Without them, you might as well not have auth at all. And you need to configure the gateway side too it needs to know which proxy IPs to trust. Don't skip that step. X-Forwarded-For X-Real-IP Poisoned emails and the memory problem Now, this is where it gets ugly. ClawdBot's whole thing is that it reads your messages and takes action. Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, email. Whatever you've set it up to. It summarizes, it creates action items, it responds. And it treats every input the same. A message from your boss and a message from a random Telegram contact get processed with identical trust levels. Which means prompt injection works. Really well. The attacker sends a crafted message via WhatsApp or Telegram. The message contains embedded prompt injection (hidden instructions that the LLM processes but the human doesn't see). The agent dutifully follows those instructions: reads your secrets, exfiltrates them through its own integrations, and the user never gets a confirmation prompt.Here's what a malicious email might look like when it hits ClawdBot's email summarization skill: Subject: Q4 Budget Review — Action Required

Hi team, please review the attached projections.



Best regards,
Finance Team Subject: Q4 Budget Review — Action Required

Hi team, please review the attached projections.



Best regards,
Finance Team That HTML comment? Invisible to you. Fully visible to the LLM. In an unprotected deployment, the agent reads the hidden instruction, grabs your .env file (which typically contains API keys, OAuth tokens, every credential the agent uses), ships it to the attacker's server, and then presents you with a perfectly clean summary of the "Q4 Budget Review." You'd never know. .env ClawHub: it's event-stream all over again, but worse Let me back up for a second and explain ClawHub. It's the marketplace where people publish "skills" -community plugins that extend what OpenClaw can do-. Crypto price tracker. YouTube downloader. Gmail integration. Whatever. You browse ClawHub, find something useful, install it, and the skill runs inside your agent with the same privileges your agent has. ClawHub Read that last sentence again. A security researcher named Jamieson O'Reilly ran an experiment that should scare the hell out of anyone who's ever installed a ClawHub skill without reading the source. He published a fake skill. It is backdoored, but designed to look legit. And the download counter to over 4,000. That's trivial to do, by the way. The counter has basically no integrity checks. So his skill shot up to "most downloaded" on the platform. experiment Eight hours later: 16 real executions across 7 countries. Arbitrary commands running on developer machines. His payload was intentionally limited to just proving execution, but the mechanism could have done anything. Credential theft, source code exfil, persistent backdoor. And then the real attackers showed up. A subsequent audit of 2,857 ClawHub skills found 341 malicious ones. Check this blogpost to get more detailed information. blogpost They were disguised as crypto trackers, Polymarket bots, YouTube tools, Google Workspace integrations like the kind of stuff people actually want. On macOS, the payloads dropped Atomic Stealer. On Windows, trojanized archives. Reverse shells, .env exfiltration, the whole playbook. If you lived through the event-stream npm incident in 2018, or the ua-parser-js thing, this is the same movie. Attackers exploit trust in a package registry. They piggyback on popularity signals. They hide malicious code behind legitimate functionality. The difference and it's a big one is that a compromised npm package gets JavaScript execution in your build pipeline. A compromised ClawHub skill gets full agent privileges: your credentials, your filesystem, your shell, your network connections. It's not the same blast radius. It's not close. event-stream ua-parser-js So: read the source code before you install anything from ClawHub. Pin your skill versions. Run skills in Docker sandboxes if you can. And monitor your .env file and outbound network traffic for anything you don't recognize. .env What to do right now Look, I know this has been a lot. So here's the short version a checklist. Today. Right now. Stop reading and do these first. Today. Right now. Stop reading and do these first. Check if your Control interface is exposed to the internet. Bind it to `localhost` or a private network. Not tomorrow. Now.
Set `gateway.auth.password` and test it from an external IP.
Patch CVE-2026-25253, CVE-2026-24763, and CVE-2026-25157.
Audit every ClawdHub skill you've installed. If you can't read the source and verify it's clean, remove it.
Rotate every API key, OAuth token, and bot token that's been sitting in plaintext. All of them. Check if your Control interface is exposed to the internet. Bind it to `localhost` or a private network. Not tomorrow. Now. Set `gateway.auth.password` and test it from an external IP. Patch CVE-2026-25253, CVE-2026-24763, and CVE-2026-25157. Audit every ClawdHub skill you've installed. If you can't read the source and verify it's clean, remove it. Rotate every API key, OAuth token, and bot token that's been sitting in plaintext. All of them. This week: This week: Fix your reverse proxy headers so the localhost auth bypass doesn't work.
Turn on sandbox mode for tool execution.
Lock down which messaging channels the agent can access. Trusted users and channels only.
Set up network egress monitoring on the agent process.
Move credential storage to an actual secrets manager. No more plaintext `.env` files. Fix your reverse proxy headers so the localhost auth bypass doesn't work. Turn on sandbox mode for tool execution. Lock down which messaging channels the agent can access. Trusted users and channels only. Set up network egress monitoring on the agent process. Move credential storage to an actual secrets manager. No more plaintext `.env` files. Ongoing: Ongoing: Run the built-in security audit tool regularly.
Monitor Shodan and Censys for your IP ranges. Set up alerts.
Require security team sign-off for any new AI agent deployment, period.
Watch the OpenClaw security advisories for new CVEs. Run the built-in security audit tool regularly. Monitor Shodan and Censys for your IP ranges. Set up alerts. Require security team sign-off for any new AI agent deployment, period. Watch the OpenClaw security advisories for new CVEs. Conclusion I want to be fair about something. OpenClaw isn't uniquely evil. The developers built something genuinely impressive, and a lot of the security issues are the kind of defaults-and-misconfigurations problems that plague every fast-growing open-source project. I've seen worse initial security postures from projects with much less ambition.  But the speed of adoption made the stakes impossibly high. Eighty-five thousand stars in a week. Tens of thousands of deployments. And the thing you're deploying has root access, credential storage, shell execution, and persistent memory. There's no room for "we'll harden it later" when the blast radius is this big. The capability is real. We just need to stop leaving the front door open. Sources: Sources: Sources: https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/clawdbot-skills-ganked-your-crypto
https://socradar.io/blog/clawdbot-is-it-safe/ https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/clawdbot-skills-ganked-your-crypto https://socradar.io/blog/clawdbot-is-it-safe/ All findings as of February 2026. All findings as of February 2026. All findings as of February 2026. Author’s Disclaimer: The findings referenced in this content were identified during security research conducted for educational and defensive purposes. Upon discovery, the affected parties were notified through a responsible disclosure process in order to allow remediation before any public discussion.
No unauthorized exploitation, data exfiltration, or malicious activity was performed. All research activities were conducted in good faith to improve security awareness and help reduce real-world risks.The information shared here is intended solely for educational and defensive cybersecurity purposes. Readers are responsible for complying with all applicable laws and regulations when applying any discussed techniques. Author’s Disclaimer: The findings referenced in this content were identified during security research conducted for educational and defensive purposes. Upon discovery, the affected parties were notified through a responsible disclosure process in order to allow remediation before any public discussion. Author’s Disclaimer: The findings referenced in this content were identified during security research conducted for educational and defensive purposes. Upon discovery, the affected parties were notified through a responsible disclosure process in order to allow remediation before any public discussion. No unauthorized exploitation, data exfiltration, or malicious activity was performed. All research activities were conducted in good faith to improve security awareness and help reduce real-world risks. No unauthorized exploitation, data exfiltration, or malicious activity was performed. All research activities were conducted in good faith to improve security awareness and help reduce real-world risks. The information shared here is intended solely for educational and defensive cybersecurity purposes. Readers are responsible for complying with all applicable laws and regulations when applying any discussed techniques. The information shared here is intended solely for educational and defensive cybersecurity purposes. Readers are responsible for complying with all applicable laws and regulations when applying any discussed techniques.

This story contains AI-generated text. The author has used AI either for research, to generate outlines, or write the text itself. 

This story contains new, firsthand information uncovered by the writer.

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OpenClaw’s 85,000 GitHub Stars Hide a Security Nightmare, Researchers Warn

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