This was a privilege-escalation bug, but not "any random Telegram/Discord message can instantly own every OpenClaw instance."
The root issue was an incomplete fix. The earlier advisory hardened the gateway RPC path for device approvals by passing the caller's scopes into the core approval check. But the `/pair approve` plugin command path still called the same approval function without `callerScopes`, and the core logic failed open when that parameter was missing.
So the strongest confirmed exploit path was: a client that ALREADY HAD GATEWAY ACCESS and enough permission to send commands could use `chat.send` with `/pair approve latest` to approve a pending device request asking for broader scopes, including `operator.admin`. In other words: a scope-ceiling bypass from pairing/write-level access to admin.
This was not primarily a Telegram-specific or message-provider-specific bug. The bug lived in the shared plugin command handler, so any already-authorized command sender that could reach `/pair approve` could hit it. For Telegram specifically, the default DM policy blocks unknown outsiders before command execution, so this was not "message the bot once and get admin." But an already-authorized Telegram sender could still reach the vulnerable path.
The practical risk for this was very low, especially if OpenClaw is used as single-user personal assistant. We're working hard to harden the codebase with folks from Nvidia, ByteDance, Tencent and OpenAI.
Can you speak a little bit more to the stats in the OP?
* 135k+ OpenClaw instances are publicly exposed
* 63% of those run zero authentication. Meaning the "low privilege required" in the CVE = literally anyone on the internet can request pairing access and start the exploit chain
Is this accurate? This is definitely a very different picture then the one you paint
That’s surprising, as the OpenClaw installation makes it pretty difficult to run without auth and explicit device pairing (I don’t even know if that’s possible).
The problem is that a lot of users of OpenClaw use a chatbot to set it up for them so it has a habit of killing safety features if it runs into roadblocks due to user requests. This makes installations super heterogeneous.
> We're working hard to harden the codebase with folks from Nvidia, ByteDance, Tencent and OpenAI.
What exactly does this mean? You have contracts with these companies? People who work for them contributed sometimes in the past to openclaw repository?
Jensen mentioned on a podcast (sorry I don’t have a link on me, it was either the all in podcast or Lex Friedman) that they are helping support and harden on the security side, and that he considers it like the “iPhone moment”
Most of these larger players are interested in supporting anything that helps grow the ecosystem so broadly.
> We're working hard to harden the codebase with folks from Nvidia, ByteDance, Tencent and OpenAI.
But coding is solved? Why do you need those guys if all they do is use claude code? Just have it solve it overnight. You forgot to prompt "make it secure pls"?
My reply which was not an attack was detached from this sub thread as an attack. All I did was ask a clarifying question about why Telegram and Discord were specifically called out in this reply despite not being mentioned by the OP at all. I'd still like an answer to this question.
Just a heads up that everyone can still see the comment you made on your profile because it wasn't removed by moderator action. It was downvoted to oblivion because it was an attack on another user for using AI.
That user said that they use OpenClaw to scrape city meetings for context so that they can more efficiently participate in local politics. You then attacked them, accusing them of "leaving AI slop comments on public city meetings", which isn't what they said they were doing at all.
I see absolutely no problem in using AI to summarize large quantities of information (such as a collection of city meeting notes). Summarization is one of the places that AI really shines right now, and if it helps people wrap their head around what is happening in their communities, good!
I understand a healthy skepticm of AI. Everyone should have some degree of that. But maybe avoid the urge to publicly shame people for their use of AI, especially on a site like this where that won't be received well. Or, if you're going to offer criticism, show some tact.
I’m surprised people are still using OpenClaw. I assumed they’d have switched to Nanoclaw or Nemoclaw. Is OpenClaw just that much better, or is it all inertia?
I don't use OpenClaw, but I still run my Claude Code and Codex as limited macOS user accounts and just have a script `become-agent <name> [cmd ...]` that does some sudo stuff to run as the limited user so they don't have any of my environment or directory access, or really any system-level admin access at all. They can use and write to their home directories as usual, which makes things easier to configure since those CLI harnesses really like when $HOME is configured and works as expected.
It's a good compromise between running as me and full sandbox-exec. Multi-user Unix-y systems were designed for this kind of stuff since decades ago.
This is why kernel-level sandboxing matters. I use a sandbox name greywall that enforce filesystem/network isolation at the syscall level (Landlock + Seccomp + eBPF on linux, sandbox-exec on mac).
I do disagree about unix system were designed for this kind of stuff. Unix was not designed for an agent to act like you and take decision for you...
> Yes, if/since that user have no access to your apple id and keychain...
Right, these are system accounts. They don't have access to anything except their own home folder and whatever I put in their .bashrc. `sudo` is a pretty easy sandbox by itself and lets me manage their home folders, shell, and environment easily just with the typical Unix-isms. No need for mounting VM disks, persisting disk images, etc.
I don't need virtualization to let Claude Code run. I just let it run as a "claude" user.
Title is a bit misleading, no? You have to have openclaw running on an open box. And the post even says "135k open instances" out of 500k running instances? so a bit clickbait-y
The 135k number appears to be pulled out of thin air? No idea where the 65% comes from. The command the post gives to list paired devices isn't correct. These are red flags.
It's pretty reasonable though, a lot of OpenClaw instances are hosted on a VPS, this is not unsafe.
My interpretation is that 135k instances are vulnerable, but of those there's more conditions that need to be met, specifically:
These need to be multi-user systems where there are users with 'basic pairing' privileges. Which I don't think is very common, most instances are single-user.
So way less than the 135k number. I think a more accurate title would have been "If you're running OpenClaw, you are probably vulnerable" but not "you probably got hacked", that's just outright false and there's no evidence that the exposed users were ALL hacked.
You know you’re getting into zealot territory when people are arguing semantics over the headline pointing to a zero authentication admin access vulnerability CVE that affects a double-digit percentage of users.
Does it really? Digging up the data from example the 135k instances in the open reeks like bullshit, I would suspect several other claims are exaggerated as well.
> Digging up the data from example the 135k instances in the open reeks like bullshit, I would suspect several other claims are exaggerated as well.
Do you so stringently examine most CVEs? I’ll bet you don’t. Are you a big fan of this project? I’ll bet you are. Do you have any actual data to counter what they said or do you just sort of generally not vibe with it? If so, now would be a great time to break it out while this is still fresh. If not…
They are pointing out the data provided does not appear to be real. There is no credible link to this 135k number. They do not need to provide a number, as one does not appear to exist.
It’s also only 65% of those that have zero authentication configured, according to that post (which I have done nothing to confirm or challenge at all… Frankly I wouldn’t touch OpenClaw with a ten foot… cable?) That said, I think it’s far more important to get people’s attention who might otherwise not realize how closely they need to pay attention to CVEs than it is to avoid hyperbole in headlines.
Because 20% is not “probably got hacked” and overstates the problem for most users.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t a critical vulnerability, and I think it’s insane to run OpenClaw in its current state. But the current headline will burn your credibility, because 80% of users will be fine with no action, and they’ll take future security issues less seriously as a result.
All the numbers you are using appear to be made up by the reddit poster. I say that as they provided no citation to them (for all I know they got them from an AI). I attempted to verify any of the numbers he used and could not. By exaggerating the numbers he is crying wolf.
Well, such things were to be expected.
It's easy to bash on all the people who haven't gotten the necessary IT understanding of securing such things. Of course, it's uber-dumb to run an unprotected instance.
But at the same time, it's also quite cool that so many people can do interesting IT stuff now.
I'm thinking basically it's a trade-off. Be able to do great stuff, live with the consequences of doing that without proper training.
Like repairing your car yourself. You might have fun doing it, it might get you somewhere, but you have to accept that if you have no idea about cars, you just introduced a pretty big risk into your life (say if you replaced the brakes or something).
But yea, security, privacy, fighting climate change, all very much on the decline - humans doing cool things, ignoring important things - we'll have to live with the consequences.
Yeah... The bill is already being paid. I wonder how the life quality of my nephew (and other children) of 5 years old today will be in the near future..
With your car example, you also assume the risk unto others. If your "chopper" of a car hits and kills someone else, and you survive, you're paying for the consequences of that. I don't think it's cool that untrained people can do interesting IT stuff now. I see it as a huge liability where some unsecured instance pwns the internet, then it's some 12 year old that gets marched in front of congress and everyone goes: "wtf?" There's essentially no accountability and the damage is still done.
Edit: Default binding was to 0.0.0.0, and if you were not aware of this and assumed your router was keeping you safe, you probably should not be using OpenClaw. In fact some services may still default to 0.0.0.0: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/5263
Since pretty much the beginning it wasn't and the documentation explicitly warned not to make it public, exposing it to the internet. It included information on how you can properly forward the gateway port to your machine without opening it up to the internet.
OpenClaw has over 400+ security issues and vulnerabilities. [0]
Why on earth would you install something like that has access to your entire machine, even if it is a separate one which has the potential to scan local networks?
Who is even making money out of OpenClaw other than the people attempting to host it? I see little use out of it other than a way to get yourself hacked by anyone.
Most of the people using it probably don't even know what SSH is, let alone using a VPS to maintain a personal bot for them for years with no maintenance. They know Vercel and Supabase. They will run it on their local machine and just keep clicking yes to everything until they get the result they want.
That is not how the software works.. I take it you have no first hand knowledge with this stack? This isn't a double click the exe and you are off the races. The hostinger vps is actually the easiest way for a normie to get this running.
This is not true. It is useful without having access to a single account of mine. My setup runs on its own accounts and hardware. Obviously it is not sending out emails from my inbox, but that is not a usecase of any value to me. And if it was, there are actually plenty of ways to do that safely as well.
If you think you need to give it the keys to your kingdoom to be useful, you are not actually experimenting with this stack but regurgitating the words of others. I really don't understand the mindset of comments like this.
With respect...Security through obscurity is dead. We are approaching the point where only formally verified (for security) systems can be trusted. Every possible attack will be attempted. Every opening will be exploited, and every useful combination of those exploits will be done.
LLMs are patient, tireless, capable of rigorous opsec, and effectively infinite in number.
Think of all the people that are too ignorant to even understand the basics of any of this that are running OpenClaw. They will be completely unaware and attackers can easily hide their tracks by changing system prompts (among plenty of other things).
Honest question: What do people actually USE OpenClaw for? The most common usage seems to be "it reads your emails!", that's the exact opposite of "exciting"...
I've only been playing with it recently ... I have mine scraping for SF city meetings that I can attend and public comment to advocate for more housing etc (https://github.com/sgillen/sf-civic-digest).
It also have mine automatically grabs a spot at my gym when spots are released because I always forget.
I'm just playing with it, it's been fun! It's all on a VM in the cloud and I assume it could get pwned at any time but the blast radius would be small.
But he already did this. With a bonus of it will continue to work in the future if something breaks or changes. Human time is more precious than computing resources nowadays.
Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts. That's not really worth the time, especially when you want summaries and not having to skim things yourself.
Going from doing it manually on a regular basis to an autonomous agent turns a frequent 5-15 minute task into a 30 second one.
> Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts.
The very first line in your readme is "CivicClaw is a set of scripts and prompts" though? And almost the entire repo is a bunch of python scripts under a /scripts folder.
Parent isn't saying that bespoke scripts are bad, just that it's not worth their time to write them. The value of the bot is that it can do that for you.
I use it for a side project. I just put it on VPS, and then it edits the code and tests it. The nice thing is that I can use it on the go whenever I have spare moment. It is addictive, but way better addiction than social media IMO.
The thing where you give it access to all your personal data and whatever I haven't done and wouldn't do.
I don't use this one, but a simpler one, also running on a vps. I communicate via telegram.
I say to it: check my pending tasks on Todoist and see if you can tackle on of those by yourself.
It then finds some bugs in a webapp that I took note. I tell it to go for it, but use a new branch and deploy it on a new url. So it clones the repo, fix it, commit, push, deploy, and test. It just messages me afterwards.
This is possible because it has access to my todoist and github and several other services.
I use it mostly for the crons, it runs a personal productivity system that tracks my tasks, provides nudges, talks through stuff etc. It's all stored in an Obsidian vault that syncs to my desktop. I don't use it to control email/calendars or other agents.
I use it to manage a media server. And use natural language to download movies and series. Also I use to for homeassistant so I csn use natural language for vacuuming the house and things like that. I do use it for a number of other tasks but those are the most partical.
I was asked by someone recently to try to set up an OpenClaw that would search for ordinances and other land registry information for all 3000+ counties/parishes in the USA to obtain and distill specific details on their support for building tiny homes.
Claude Desktop and Code are built for synchronous, human-in-the-loop interactions. Scraping 3000 janky municipal websites, you need a "fire-and-forget" background worker. Claw lets you kick off a massive job and just get a ping when it's done.
I'd also instantly hit Claude Desktop's rate limits with this I reckon. Since Claw uses APIs, you bypass those limits and can route the messy scraping to cheap models, saving expensive ones for the actual analysis. It also handles Playwright integration and state persistence out of the box so a crash doesn't wipe your progress.
If I'm wrong, I'm open to learning. I'm as new to this as everyone :)
I give it monumental tasks. For example, I will write massive markdown files describing all the features I want to see in an application, and I will use a standard AI chatbot to check my work and consider additional details. Finally, when I have everything written down, I upload it to OpenClaw and tell the agent to make it happen.
Sometimes it toils away for 2+ hours, spawning Claude Code instances, checking its work, testing the code, even using browser automation to make sure everything works the way it is supposed to if it's writing a webapp.
In the end, it consumes like $10-20 worth of tokens and spits out a functional application with everything I asked for.
Claude Code can do this on its own, to an extent, but there's something about getting OpenClaw to iterate through multiple sessions and testing everything to make sure it works the way I described that I really like. It completely offloads the process to the AI, and keeps me mostly out of the loop.
Is the code any good? Probably not. Am I at risk of being exploited by malware? Probably. But I have automated quite a lot of things with the software that OpenClaw builds for me, and I am careful to review the libraries it imports before running the code on any machine with actual access to anything I actually care about.
Personally, anyone using OpenClaw for the "it reads your emails" use case is crazy, because prompt injection is real, and you're basically inviting anyone who knows your email address to take a stab at pwning you, with full access to your personal life. I keep my instances on a VPS, behind a restrictive security group, and only accessible via Tailscale where it has zero access to anything on my tailnet. I only recently gave it its own email account (not mine!), but even then I am skeptical of doing so, and take efforts to prevent it from taking action on any email it receives (e.g., disabling the Heartbeat) because who knows what it'll end up doing. I mostly like that it can email me if I ask it to.
My main takeaway message is: models (even opus4.6) do not follow security "instructions" reliably. In OpenClaw, they added security warnings, tags, random IDs... None of these countermeasures work reliably. Even sandboxing can be escaped (not in the classical sense using vulnerabilities, but using multi-layered prompt injection payload with natural language only)[0].
As soon as untrusted content is injected in the context, do not trust any actions downstream.
Agent based chron jobs mostly that work with other agents. It’s really nice if you want to tell your computer to do something repeatedly or in confluence with many other agents in a very simple way. Like check my email for messages from Nadia and send me a notification and turn on all the lights in my driveway when she gets there without having to actually get into the nuts and bolts of implementing it. It’s actually really powerful and probably what Siri should be.
I think this is close to the head of the nail. It kinda unlocks handling novelish asks that previous siri/alexa just couldnt handle. As long as a thing has well documented api spec then it instantly is usable. This makes the clawbot flow extraordinarily more useful.
I think devs are too focused on the technical what did u build with it.
For example. My brother runs a small recruiting agency. Super nontechnical. Out of nowhere he asks me about openclaw. Then with no help, he sets it up and uses it. Still no help, he has all kinds of nonsense hooked up and running blowing through tokens. He is blown away by it and wants to get it for all of his employees. He thinks about it in terms of cost per min running and not in tokens.
This is the sticky gooey value to whatever openclaw is doing.
Assuming you're asking in good faith, IMHO the deeper story around OpenClaw is that it's the core piece of a larger pattern.
The way I'm seeing folks responsibly use OpenClaw is to install it as a well-regulated governor driving other agents and other tools. It is effectively the big brain orchestrating a larger system.
So for instance, you could have an OpenClaw jail where you-the-human talk to OpenClaw via some channel, and then that directs OpenClaw to put lower-level agents to work.
In some sense it's a bit like Dwarf Fortress or the old Dungeon Keeper game. You declare what you want to have happen and then the imps run off and do it.
[EDIT: I truly down understand sometimes why people downvote things. If you don't like what I'm saying, at least reply with some kind of argument.]
So I neither downvoted nor upvoted you, but I think people may be downvoting, in addition to the fact that they just don't like the thing, based on the fact that you didn't directly answer the question. Specifically, what are you using it for, not what hypothetically it would be used for.
You're probably being downvoted because you didn't answer the question. The questioner specifically asked what people are using it for and you answered by describing your technical setup. What we want to know is, what are you actually achieving with this tool?
First words out of your mouth are to accuse OP of not seriously asking the question. Then you write paragraphs saying nothing much at all. You could have simply answered the question in a simple straightforward manner.
You have yet to answer the original question - what do you actually do with OpenClaw? A concrete example of something that actually happens, not a system architecture description.
so far, I've used it to kill a bunch of time trying to get it to respond to "Hi @Kirk" in a private Slack channel.
...and to laugh a little every time it calls me "commander" or asks "What's the next mission?" or (and this is the best one) it uses the catchphrase I gave it which is "it's probably fine" (and it uses it entirely appropriately...I think there must have been a lot of sarcasm in qwen 3.5's training data)
and I've treated it like it's already been compromised the whole time.
Obviously I already searched the web (not specifically HN I must admit) and there were always incredibly generic non-answers that ultimately say nothing (and they assume you have 3000$ per month or 2000 Mac Minis on your desk (hyperbole)).
Incredibly, one of the responses you got already is exactly one of those replies that says nothing. There's a whole bunch of words that don't actually answer the question.
Why would I do that? I am entirely good using LLMs like Claude building tools for me. There's no use case for OpenClawthat I am aware of can replace of what I have/need.
I think it makes my point strong, people who uses OpenClaw, might be lazy on how to do things properly with LLMs.
Before I decide to shoot up smack, I like to ask junkies what the whole heroin experience is like, what they use it for, and how it has affected their lives.
The current OpenClaw GitHub repo [1] contains 2.1 million lines of code, according to cloc, with 1.6M being typescript. It also has almost 26K commits.
Please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack. Your comment would be fine but for the paragraph in the middle where it does that.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
The guidelines still apply, even if you feel negatively towards a project and its creator. Indeed it's even more important to make the effort to heed the guidelines for topics you feel negatively towards (after all, it's easy to be respectful about things we feel positively towards).
Thanks for explaining, is this mostly about replying directly to the person involved in the project? Compared to e.g. a comment in a thread about OpenClaw without replying directly to the creator? Just trying to figure out where the line is, I do think snark is a valid form of criticism sometimes but it's your house after all.
I'm critical of OpenClaw and even the author to some extent, but I prefer to have nuanced and compartmentalized conversations, on a thread about a specific vulnerability, it's much more productive to talk about the specific vulnerability rather than OpenClaw as a whole. Otherwise we would only have generic OpenClaw conversations and we would only be saying the same thing.
The comment could have been more substantive but it isn't generic or tangential. Discussing a vulnerability ultimately means discussing the failures of process that allowed it to be shipped. Especially with these application-level logic bugs that static analyzers can't generally find, the most productive outcome (after the vulnerability is fixed) is to discuss what process changes we can make to avoid shipping the next vulnerability. I'm sure there's hardening that can be done in OpenClaw but the premise of OpenClaw is to integrate many different services - it has a really large attack surface, only so much can be done to mitigate that, so it's critical to create code review processes that catch these issues.
OpenClaw is probably entering a phase of it's life where prototype-grade YOLO processes (like what the tweet describes) aren't going to cut it anymore. That's not really a criticism, the product's success has over vaulted it's maturity, which is a fortunate problem to have.
Your comment is obviously against the rules, but I read it as: Why are people not more careful? This is some unknown, app, with unknown, unvetted depths, and you only like it because other people say it's shiny and AI. It made you giddy, and you forgot that giving a tool permissions is an invitation to hackers. Well, you went ahead and ignored all common sense, and here we are.
If you're running OpenClaw, you already threw security and reliability out the window by running LLMs on the command line. It's a bit late to start worrying now.
That razor is poorly understood. It’s not malice if it can be explained by stupidity. In this case it’s not explained by stupidity, as the guy who made OpenClaw is very smart. Therefore, it can only be malice.
In this case I'd say that it was made not to enable that, but in total disregard of its realistic uses and risks. In a sense this is less... deliberate poisoning, and more doing a bad job cutting heroin with fentanyl for distribution. Yeah the result is the same, but the cause is negligence to the point of parody rather than outright malice.
Setting it up that way is a choice a user would have to make. Just set it up on an oauth or budgeted api and not be an idiot. Setup additional guardrails in OC if you think are necessary.
This was a privilege-escalation bug, but not "any random Telegram/Discord message can instantly own every OpenClaw instance."
The root issue was an incomplete fix. The earlier advisory hardened the gateway RPC path for device approvals by passing the caller's scopes into the core approval check. But the `/pair approve` plugin command path still called the same approval function without `callerScopes`, and the core logic failed open when that parameter was missing.
So the strongest confirmed exploit path was: a client that ALREADY HAD GATEWAY ACCESS and enough permission to send commands could use `chat.send` with `/pair approve latest` to approve a pending device request asking for broader scopes, including `operator.admin`. In other words: a scope-ceiling bypass from pairing/write-level access to admin.
This was not primarily a Telegram-specific or message-provider-specific bug. The bug lived in the shared plugin command handler, so any already-authorized command sender that could reach `/pair approve` could hit it. For Telegram specifically, the default DM policy blocks unknown outsiders before command execution, so this was not "message the bot once and get admin." But an already-authorized Telegram sender could still reach the vulnerable path.
The practical risk for this was very low, especially if OpenClaw is used as single-user personal assistant. We're working hard to harden the codebase with folks from Nvidia, ByteDance, Tencent and OpenAI.
* 135k+ OpenClaw instances are publicly exposed
* 63% of those run zero authentication. Meaning the "low privilege required" in the CVE = literally anyone on the internet can request pairing access and start the exploit chain
Is this accurate? This is definitely a very different picture then the one you paint
What exactly does this mean? You have contracts with these companies? People who work for them contributed sometimes in the past to openclaw repository?
NVIDIA is contributing to the security of OpenClaw via NemoClaw.[0]
Not sure about ByteDance and Tencent.
0. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai/nemoclaw/
Or did you just see "China" and decide it must be malicous?
(This is a rhetorical question, I already know it's the latter)
Most of these larger players are interested in supporting anything that helps grow the ecosystem so broadly.
But coding is solved? Why do you need those guys if all they do is use claude code? Just have it solve it overnight. You forgot to prompt "make it secure pls"?
That user said that they use OpenClaw to scrape city meetings for context so that they can more efficiently participate in local politics. You then attacked them, accusing them of "leaving AI slop comments on public city meetings", which isn't what they said they were doing at all.
I see absolutely no problem in using AI to summarize large quantities of information (such as a collection of city meeting notes). Summarization is one of the places that AI really shines right now, and if it helps people wrap their head around what is happening in their communities, good!
I understand a healthy skepticm of AI. Everyone should have some degree of that. But maybe avoid the urge to publicly shame people for their use of AI, especially on a site like this where that won't be received well. Or, if you're going to offer criticism, show some tact.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I can understand why, but given that OpenClaw has taken over the world, I find the lack of a ShowHN somewhat interesting.
Currently we're at 1.8 CVEs per day since OpenClaw launched!
(I’ve never used any of them.)
https://github.com/nousresearch/hermes-agent
It's a good compromise between running as me and full sandbox-exec. Multi-user Unix-y systems were designed for this kind of stuff since decades ago.
I do disagree about unix system were designed for this kind of stuff. Unix was not designed for an agent to act like you and take decision for you...
Not too much harder is using a VM:
With Apple's open-source container tool, you can spin up a linux container vm in ~100ms. (No docker root)
With Apple virtualization framework, you can run macOS in a VM (with a separate apple id).
Right, these are system accounts. They don't have access to anything except their own home folder and whatever I put in their .bashrc. `sudo` is a pretty easy sandbox by itself and lets me manage their home folders, shell, and environment easily just with the typical Unix-isms. No need for mounting VM disks, persisting disk images, etc.
I don't need virtualization to let Claude Code run. I just let it run as a "claude" user.
My interpretation is that 135k instances are vulnerable, but of those there's more conditions that need to be met, specifically:
These need to be multi-user systems where there are users with 'basic pairing' privileges. Which I don't think is very common, most instances are single-user.
So way less than the 135k number. I think a more accurate title would have been "If you're running OpenClaw, you are probably vulnerable" but not "you probably got hacked", that's just outright false and there's no evidence that the exposed users were ALL hacked.
Do you so stringently examine most CVEs? I’ll bet you don’t. Are you a big fan of this project? I’ll bet you are. Do you have any actual data to counter what they said or do you just sort of generally not vibe with it? If so, now would be a great time to break it out while this is still fresh. If not…
Otherwise I would say “you may have been hacked” not “you probably have been hacked”.
If you're running OpenClaw, you probably didn't get hacked in the last week.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t a critical vulnerability, and I think it’s insane to run OpenClaw in its current state. But the current headline will burn your credibility, because 80% of users will be fine with no action, and they’ll take future security issues less seriously as a result.
Edit: Default binding was to 0.0.0.0, and if you were not aware of this and assumed your router was keeping you safe, you probably should not be using OpenClaw. In fact some services may still default to 0.0.0.0: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/5263
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/5643a934799dc523...
Why on earth would you install something like that has access to your entire machine, even if it is a separate one which has the potential to scan local networks?
Who is even making money out of OpenClaw other than the people attempting to host it? I see little use out of it other than a way to get yourself hacked by anyone.
[0] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/security
/s
If you think you need to give it the keys to your kingdoom to be useful, you are not actually experimenting with this stack but regurgitating the words of others. I really don't understand the mindset of comments like this.
Shipping at the speed of inference for real.
Run it as root it will have root caps, run it as ritcgab it will have ritcgab's caps. Same as every other program.
LLMs are patient, tireless, capable of rigorous opsec, and effectively infinite in number.
This is bad.
It also have mine automatically grabs a spot at my gym when spots are released because I always forget.
I'm just playing with it, it's been fun! It's all on a VM in the cloud and I assume it could get pwned at any time but the blast radius would be small.
seems far more efficient/reliable to get codex/claude code to write and set up a bot that does this.
But he already did this. With a bonus of it will continue to work in the future if something breaks or changes. Human time is more precious than computing resources nowadays.
>I use it to give me a weekly digest of what happened in my neighborhood and if there are any public hearings or trash pickups I might want to attend.
Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts. That's not really worth the time, especially when you want summaries and not having to skim things yourself.
Going from doing it manually on a regular basis to an autonomous agent turns a frequent 5-15 minute task into a 30 second one.
The very first line in your readme is "CivicClaw is a set of scripts and prompts" though? And almost the entire repo is a bunch of python scripts under a /scripts folder.
I looked at one randomly chosen script (scripts/sf_rec_park.py) and it's 549 lines of Python to fetch and summarise data that is available on an RSS feed ( https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=... )
The thing where you give it access to all your personal data and whatever I haven't done and wouldn't do.
I say to it: check my pending tasks on Todoist and see if you can tackle on of those by yourself.
It then finds some bugs in a webapp that I took note. I tell it to go for it, but use a new branch and deploy it on a new url. So it clones the repo, fix it, commit, push, deploy, and test. It just messages me afterwards.
This is possible because it has access to my todoist and github and several other services.
I'd also instantly hit Claude Desktop's rate limits with this I reckon. Since Claw uses APIs, you bypass those limits and can route the messy scraping to cheap models, saving expensive ones for the actual analysis. It also handles Playwright integration and state persistence out of the box so a crash doesn't wipe your progress.
If I'm wrong, I'm open to learning. I'm as new to this as everyone :)
For example you mentioned playwright? That can be automated. It doesn’t need to be a free form tool that the agent uses at will.
If that means the scripts need to be adopted to changes, then that’s a separate, controlled workflow.
This approach can save you a ton of tokens, increasee reliability and observability, and it saves compute as well.
Sometimes it‘s useful to let the agent do things fully agentic, so you can then iteratively extract the deterministic parts.
Sometimes it toils away for 2+ hours, spawning Claude Code instances, checking its work, testing the code, even using browser automation to make sure everything works the way it is supposed to if it's writing a webapp.
In the end, it consumes like $10-20 worth of tokens and spits out a functional application with everything I asked for.
Claude Code can do this on its own, to an extent, but there's something about getting OpenClaw to iterate through multiple sessions and testing everything to make sure it works the way I described that I really like. It completely offloads the process to the AI, and keeps me mostly out of the loop.
Is the code any good? Probably not. Am I at risk of being exploited by malware? Probably. But I have automated quite a lot of things with the software that OpenClaw builds for me, and I am careful to review the libraries it imports before running the code on any machine with actual access to anything I actually care about.
Personally, anyone using OpenClaw for the "it reads your emails" use case is crazy, because prompt injection is real, and you're basically inviting anyone who knows your email address to take a stab at pwning you, with full access to your personal life. I keep my instances on a VPS, behind a restrictive security group, and only accessible via Tailscale where it has zero access to anything on my tailnet. I only recently gave it its own email account (not mine!), but even then I am skeptical of doing so, and take efforts to prevent it from taking action on any email it receives (e.g., disabling the Heartbeat) because who knows what it'll end up doing. I mostly like that it can email me if I ask it to.
[0] https://itmeetsot.eu/posts/2026-03-27-openclaw_webfetch/
[1] https://itmeetsot.eu/posts/2026-03-03-openclaw3/
My main takeaway message is: models (even opus4.6) do not follow security "instructions" reliably. In OpenClaw, they added security warnings, tags, random IDs... None of these countermeasures work reliably. Even sandboxing can be escaped (not in the classical sense using vulnerabilities, but using multi-layered prompt injection payload with natural language only)[0]. As soon as untrusted content is injected in the context, do not trust any actions downstream.
[0] https://itmeetsot.eu/posts/2026-02-15-openclaw_sandbox/
I think devs are too focused on the technical what did u build with it.
For example. My brother runs a small recruiting agency. Super nontechnical. Out of nowhere he asks me about openclaw. Then with no help, he sets it up and uses it. Still no help, he has all kinds of nonsense hooked up and running blowing through tokens. He is blown away by it and wants to get it for all of his employees. He thinks about it in terms of cost per min running and not in tokens.
This is the sticky gooey value to whatever openclaw is doing.
The way I'm seeing folks responsibly use OpenClaw is to install it as a well-regulated governor driving other agents and other tools. It is effectively the big brain orchestrating a larger system.
So for instance, you could have an OpenClaw jail where you-the-human talk to OpenClaw via some channel, and then that directs OpenClaw to put lower-level agents to work.
In some sense it's a bit like Dwarf Fortress or the old Dungeon Keeper game. You declare what you want to have happen and then the imps run off and do it.
[EDIT: I truly down understand sometimes why people downvote things. If you don't like what I'm saying, at least reply with some kind of argument.]
...and to laugh a little every time it calls me "commander" or asks "What's the next mission?" or (and this is the best one) it uses the catchphrase I gave it which is "it's probably fine" (and it uses it entirely appropriately...I think there must have been a lot of sarcasm in qwen 3.5's training data)
and I've treated it like it's already been compromised the whole time.
Your best way of finding if it's useful for you is to install it and explore, just like you would with any other software tool.
I think it makes my point strong, people who uses OpenClaw, might be lazy on how to do things properly with LLMs.
Nina Hagen - Smack Jack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIDnN34ZZaE
>Smack Ist Dreck, Stop It Oder Verreck!
This is exactly why I have zero interest in engaging with people over this topic.
Too much focus on shipping features, not enough attention to stability and security.
As the code base grows exponentially, so does the security vulnerability surface.
[1] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
The guidelines still apply, even if you feel negatively towards a project and its creator. Indeed it's even more important to make the effort to heed the guidelines for topics you feel negatively towards (after all, it's easy to be respectful about things we feel positively towards).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I see you haven't heard of Microsoft...
- "You're absolutely right. One should read and understand their own code. I did, and it looks great"
OpenClaw is probably entering a phase of it's life where prototype-grade YOLO processes (like what the tweet describes) aren't going to cut it anymore. That's not really a criticism, the product's success has over vaulted it's maturity, which is a fortunate problem to have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Intelligence asset.
Useful idiot.
Plenty of reasons.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629849 and marked it off topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Who wants the fame must also take the blame.
Especially if they create a dangerous tool.
Edit: there was another case of this recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576107
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084
The point is that mob dynamics do more damage to the community than the threads add value, and protecting the community has to be the high-order bit.
All new technology has issues. Figure it out.
Especially if you're spending $3k per month on inference, have the model fix the agent.
I suppose the idea is to wait for someone else to productize it.
Lazy.