Hacker News

The root issue is that OpenClaw is 500K+ lines of vibe coded bloat that's impossible to reason about or understand.

Too much focus on shipping features, not enough attention to stability and security.

As the code base grows exponentially, so does the security vulnerability surface.

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.

Is this you?

https://x.com/steipete/status/2005451576971043097

> Confession: I ship code I never read. Here's my 2025 workflow.

Might want to start reading it I'd say.

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

There used to be a time where people who shipped CVEs took accountability.

About time to read the code you ship now...

The level of seriousness of your attitude here is not commensurate to the blatant security problem you are creating in the world.

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.

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.

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.

my claw controls my old M2 mac, mostly my claw uses Claude code to code

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.]

This question gets asked a lot, and then answered a lot, and then asked again.. why fill the cup if the cup has a hole?

EDIT:

Y'all can downvote me if you want, but parent poster couldn't find clawhub.ai with 45K skills for OpenClaw.

Kinda belies the "No one uses OpenClaw for anything" line.

https://clawhub.ai/skills?sort=downloads&nonSuspicious=true

I'm so tired of answering this question so I simply won't.

Your best way of finding if it's useful for you is to install it and explore, just like you would with any other software tool.

Yes, if/since that user have no access to your apple id and keychain...

Not too much harder is using a VM:

With Apple's open-source container tool, you can spin up a linux container vm in ~100ms. (No docker root)

With Apple virtualization framework, you can run macOS in a VM (with a separate apple id).

This sounds like a classic case of "35% of statistics are made up"

1/5 rounds to “probably” when discussing security.

More than 25% of users seems like a pretty accurate "probably".

The 135k instances is likely not true at all.

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.

Gonna be honest. I'd rather fight climate change than have people run LLMs unsecured

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.

“It’s OK to be hacked until everyone is getting hacked.”

Until recently, this was default configuration

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

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/5643a934799dc523...

It does not need access to your full machine. It can literally run in a vps.

The link mentions the CVE, here's the link https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-33579

The CVE seems to be real.

But this is nothing to do with the agent being tricked. This is ordinary old-fashioned code being tricked!

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.

Hanlon's Razor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

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.

What reason would Steinberger have for doing that? It was his hobby project.

Flag then move to the next one

As if the non-Reddit links aren’t majority AI slop already.