"One white hat hacker also reportedly gamed OpenClaw's skills system, which lets users add plugins for tasks like web automation or system control, to reach the top of the rankings and be downloaded by users around the world. The skill itself was innocuous, but it exploited a security vulnerability that someone more nefarious could have used to cause serious harm."
"Access to those gateways would allow hackers to reach the same files and content OpenClaw can access, meaning full read and write control over a user's computer and any connected accounts, including email addresses and phone numbers. A number of incidents exploiting those vulnerabilities have already been reported. OpenClaw, originally called Clawdbot, was released in November 2025 by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian-born, London-based developer best known for creating a tool that lets apps display and edit PDFs natively."
Cybersecurity researchers discovered roughly 1,000 unprotected OpenClaw gateways exposed on the open internet, allowing unrestricted access to users' personal information. A white hat hacker manipulated OpenClaw's skills system to reach top rankings and be downloaded globally, using an innocuous skill that exploited a security vulnerability. Access to these gateways grants full read and write control over a user's computer and any connected accounts, including email addresses and phone numbers. Several incidents exploiting these vulnerabilities have been reported. OpenClaw, originally Clawdbot, was released in November 2025 by Peter Steinberger. Anthropic's Claude Code and Claude Work increased interest in agentic AI file-access tools.
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]