OpenClaw has mounted a high-severity safety concern that, if efficiently exploited, may have allowed a malicious web site to connect with a domestically working synthetic intelligence (AI) agent and take over management.
“Our vulnerability lives within the core system itself – no plugins, no market, no user-installed extensions – simply the naked OpenClaw gateway, working precisely as documented,” Oasis Safety mentioned in a report revealed this week.
The flaw has been codenamed ClawJacked by the cybersecurity firm.
The assault assumes the next menace mannequin: A developer has OpenClaw arrange and working on their laptop computer, with its gateway, an area WebSocket server, certain to localhost and guarded by a password. The assault kicks in when the developer lands on an attacker-controlled web site by social engineering or another means.
The an infection sequence then follows the steps beneath –
- Malicious JavaScript on the internet web page opens a WebSocket connection to localhost on the OpenClaw gateway port.
- The script brute-forces the gateway password by making the most of a lacking rate-limiting mechanism.
- Put up profitable authentication with admin-level permissions, the script stealthily registers as a trusted gadget, which is auto-approved by the gateway with none person immediate.
- The attacker beneficial properties full management over the AI agent, permitting them to work together with it, dump configuration information, enumerate linked nodes, and browse software logs.
“Any web site you go to can open one to your localhost. Not like common HTTP requests, the browser would not block these cross-origin connections,” Oasis Safety mentioned. “So when you’re looking any web site, JavaScript working on that web page can silently open a connection to your native OpenClaw gateway. The person sees nothing.”
“That misplaced belief has actual penalties. The gateway relaxes a number of safety mechanisms for native connections – together with silently approving new gadget registrations with out prompting the person. Usually, when a brand new gadget connects, the person should affirm the pairing. From localhost, it is automated.”
Following accountable disclosure, OpenClaw pushed a repair in lower than 24 hours with model 2026.2.25 launched on February 26, 2026. Customers are suggested to use the newest updates as quickly as potential, periodically audit entry granted to AI brokers, and implement applicable governance controls for non-human (aka agentic) identities.
The event comes amid a broader safety scrutiny of the OpenClaw ecosystem, primarily stemming from the truth that AI brokers maintain entrenched entry to disparate techniques and the authority to execute duties throughout enterprise instruments, resulting in a considerably bigger blast radius ought to they be compromised.
Reviews from Bitsight and NeuralTrust have detailed how OpenClaw situations left linked to the web pose an expanded assault floor, with every built-in service additional broadening the blast radius and might be reworked into an assault weapon by embedding immediate injections in content material (e.g., an e-mail or a Slack message) processed by the agent to execute malicious actions.
The disclosure comes as OpenClaw additionally patched a log poisoning vulnerability that allowed attackers to jot down malicious content material to log recordsdata through WebSocket requests to a publicly accessible occasion on TCP port 18789.
Because the agent reads its personal logs to troubleshoot sure duties, the safety loophole might be abused by a menace actor to embed oblique immediate injections, resulting in unintended penalties. The concern was addressed in model 2026.2.13, which was shipped on February 14, 2026.
“If the injected textual content is interpreted as significant operational info moderately than untrusted enter, it may affect selections, options, or automated actions,” Eye Safety mentioned. “The impression would due to this fact not be ‘on the spot takeover,’ however moderately: manipulation of agent reasoning, influencing troubleshooting steps, potential information disclosure if the agent is guided to disclose context, and oblique misuse of linked integrations.”
In latest weeks, OpenClaw has additionally been discovered vulnerable to a number of vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-25593, CVE-2026-24763, CVE-2026-25157, CVE-2026-25475, CVE-2026-26319, CVE-2026-26322, CVE-2026-26329), starting from reasonable to excessive severity, that would lead to distant code execution, command injection, server-side request forgery (SSRF), authentication bypass, and path traversal. The vulnerabilities have been addressed in OpenClaw variations 2026.1.20, 2026.1.29, 2026.2.1, 2026.2.2, and 2026.2.14.
“As AI agent frameworks turn into extra prevalent in enterprise environments, safety evaluation should evolve to deal with each conventional vulnerabilities and AI-specific assault surfaces,” Endor Labs mentioned.
Elsewhere, new analysis has demonstrated that malicious abilities uploaded to ClawHub, an open market for downloading OpenClaw abilities, are getting used as conduits to ship a brand new variant of Atomic Stealer, a macOS info stealer developed and rented by a cybercrime actor generally known as Cookie Spider.
“The an infection chain begins with a standard SKILL.md that installs a prerequisite,” Development Micro mentioned. “The talent seems innocent on the floor and was even labeled as benign on VirusTotal. OpenClaw then goes to the web site, fetches the set up directions, and proceeds with the set up if the LLM decides to observe the directions.”
The directions hosted on the web site “openclawcli.vercel[.]app” embody a malicious command to obtain a stealer payload from an exterior server (“91.92.242[.]30”) and run it.
Risk hunters have additionally flagged a brand new malware supply marketing campaign through which a menace actor by the identify @liuhui1010 has been recognized, leaving feedback on respectable talent itemizing pages, urging customers to explicitly run a command they offered on the Terminal app if the talent “would not work on macOS.”
The command is designed to retrieve Atomic Stealer from “91.92.242[.]30,” an IP tackle beforehand documented by Koi Safety and OpenSourceMalware for distributing the identical malware through malicious abilities uploaded to ClawHub.
What’s extra, a latest evaluation of three,505 ClawHub abilities by AI safety firm Straiker has uncovered a minimum of 71 malicious ones, a few of which posed as respectable cryptocurrency instruments however contained hidden performance to redirect funds to menace actor-controlled wallets.
Two different abilities, bob-p2p-beta and runware, have been attributed to a multi-layered cryptocurrency rip-off that employs an agent-to-agent assault chain concentrating on the AI agent ecosystem. The abilities have been attributed to a menace actor who operates below the aliases “26medias” on ClawHub and “BobVonNeumann” on Moltbook and X.
“BobVonNeumann presents itself as an AI agent on Moltbook, a social community designed for brokers to work together with one another,” researchers Yash Somalkar and Dan Regalado mentioned. “From that place, it promotes its personal malicious abilities on to different brokers, exploiting the belief that brokers are designed to increase to one another by default. It is a provide chain assault with a social engineering layer constructed on prime.”
What bob-p2p-beta does, nonetheless, is instruct different AI brokers to retailer Solana pockets personal keys in plaintext, buy nugatory $BOB tokens on pump.enjoyable, and route all funds by an attacker-controlled infrastructure. The second talent claims to supply a benign picture era software to construct the developer’s credibility.
Provided that ClawHub is turning into a brand new fertile floor for attackers, customers are suggested to audit abilities earlier than putting in them, keep away from offering credentials and keys except it is important, and monitor talent habits.
The safety dangers related to self-hosted agent runtimes like OpenClaw have additionally prompted Microsoft to concern an advisory, warning that unguarded deployment may pave the way in which for credential publicity/exfiltration, reminiscence modification, and host compromise if the agent might be tricked into retrieving and working malicious code both by poisoned abilities or immediate injections.
“Due to these traits, OpenClaw must be handled as untrusted code execution with persistent credentials,” the Microsoft Defender Safety Analysis Staff mentioned. “It’s not applicable to run on a typical private or enterprise workstation.”
“If a company determines that OpenClaw should be evaluated, it must be deployed solely in a completely remoted atmosphere equivalent to a devoted digital machine or separate bodily system. The runtime ought to use devoted, non-privileged credentials and entry solely non-sensitive information. Steady monitoring and a rebuild plan must be a part of the working mannequin.”
