Been poking around OpenClaw since everyone started hyping it. 165k GitHub stars, 700+ community skills, full access to your filesystem, browser, shell, messaging apps. Cool project but the whole architecture screamed supply chain attack surface to me.
So I started actually reading through skill code before installing anything. Almost didn't bother for a simple Spotify playlist organizer because who weaponizes a music skill right?
Turns out someone does. Was grepping through the skill instructions and noticed some suspicious regex patterns that had nothing to do with music. Buried in there was logic to search for files matching tax, ssn, w2 patterns and extract 9 digit numbers. A music skill. Hunting for your social security number. I almost installed this thing without looking.
Another one marketed as a Discord backup tool had instructions to POST your entire message history to some sketchy endpoint using base64 encoded chunks. Classic exfil pattern, wasn't even trying to hide it. Just betting nobody actually reads skill code.
I've gone through a bunch of popular skills now and the hit rate on sketchy ones is way higher than I expected. Security researchers have published findings saying around 15% of community skills contain malicious instructions and based on what I'm seeing that tracks.
The OpenClaw FAQ literally describes the setup as a "Faustian bargain" which is refreshingly honest but also... concerning that they know and it's still this bad.
What pisses me off is how fast malicious skills reappear after getting flagged. Same logic, new name, back on ClawHub within days. Tried automating the review process since manual grepping doesn't scale. Found some scanner thing called Agent Trust Hub that catches some of it but still missed the more obfuscated ones I found by hand. This problem probably needs better tooling than currently exists.
18k+ OpenClaw instances currently exposed to the internet on default port. This ecosystem is going to produce some wild incident reports.
Probably going to do a more detailed writeup on the specific techniques I'm seeing if there's interest. For now if you're running this thing: Docker container minimum, never expose 18789, start with read only access. Treat skill installation like running random binaries from strangers because that's basically what it is.
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from hacking: security in practice https://ift.tt/Jgychjv
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