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.
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.
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.
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
According to this[1] your statement that practical risk was low is not accurate.
> The attacker acquires an account or session with operator.pairing scope. On the 63% of exposed OpenClaw instances running without authentication, this step requires no credentials at all — the attacker connects and is assigned base pairing rights.
If that's accurate, then this statement:
> This was a privilege-escalation bug, but not "any random Telegram/Discord message can instantly own every OpenClaw instance."
...is only true for the 37% of authenticated OpenClaw instances.
I'm sure it's extremely stressful and embarrassing to face the prospect that your work created a widespread, significant vulnerability. As another software engineer and a human I empathize with the discomfort of that position. But respectfully, you should put your energy into addressing this and communicating honestly about what happened and the severity, not in attempting to save face and PR damage control. You will be remembered much better for the former.
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.
Who are you replying to? The tone of your message seems to indicate you want to address some misinformation, but that isn't found here or in OP's link.
What does Telegram/Discord have to do with anything? The OP never mentioned either of these software suites. In fact the only mention of Telegram anywhere in the entire thread is you copy-pasting this exact message.
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"...
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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'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?
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.
Dodged the question entirely. Makes OP point very valid. OpenClaw is just nothing exciting to be about, it is a YOLO/FOMO experience for people so they can feel they are part of the "AI world".
You've never could have thought or guessed
That things could get so far out of hand hahahahaha
I'm gonna see you coming down in a cold sweat running
It's gonna be a different tune that you will soon be humming
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 devil has got his hooks on you
You are racing his clock
His plastic paradise won't last
you've got a no future and no past
Anyone can see your eyes
excuse me hell is full of lies
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.
> 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.
Someone has to say this, but - If you still continued to use OpenClaw despite multiple top news sites explaining the scope of the previous hacks and why you shouldn't use it, you probably deserved to get hacked
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.
Authorization failed open when a parameter was missing. Same pattern as Langflow. They patched one endpoint, missed another calling the same function. Per-endpoint hardening doesn't scale.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.