7 OpenClaw Security Challenges to Watch for in 2026

OpenClaw isn’t just another chatbot wrapper. It executes shell commands, controls your browser, manages your calendar, reads and writes files, and remembers everything across sessions. The project runs locally on your machine and connects to WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Discord, Slack, and over a dozen other platforms via pre-built integrations. It functions as a truly connected personal assistant. As a result, the use cases people have dreamed up for OpenClaw are wild.

One user showed an OpenClaw agent making money on Polymarket by monitoring news feeds and executing trades automatically. Another gave their bot access to home surveillance cameras. Someone else unleashed subagents to apply for UpWork freelancing jobs on their behalf.

But this kind of access to your digital life comes with real consequences when things go wrong. And things have gone wrong. Security researchers found that the agent shipped with serious flaws that made it possible for attackers to hijack machines with a single malicious link. Meanwhile, Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform with over 2.8 million AI agents, had its database completely exposed, so anyone could take control of any AI agent on the platform.

None of this means you should avoid OpenClaw entirely. It means you should understand OpenClaw security challenges and take precautions before spinning up an agent with root access to your laptop. Running OpenClaw in an isolated cloud environment can help neutralize some of these risks—DigitalOcean’s 1-Click Deploy for OpenClaw, for example, handles authentication, firewall rules, and container isolation out of the box so your personal machine stays out of the equation.

What are OpenClaw security challenges?

OpenClaw security challenges boil down to a design tension: the tool needs broad system permissions to be useful, but those permissions create a massive attack surface when something goes wrong. The agent runs with whatever privileges your user account has—full disk, terminal, and network access—by design.

It’s also agentic and self-improving, meaning it can modify its own behavior, update its memory, and install new skills autonomously. This is impressive from a capability standpoint, but another vector that can cause things to spiral when guardrails are missing. Pair that with defaults that skip authentication, an unvetted skill marketplace, and persistent memory storing weeks of context, and trouble follows. The takeaway: approach with caution, isolate from production systems, and carefully scrutinize the defaults.

To his credit, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger has been openly vocal about these risks and actively encourages running OpenClaw in a sandboxed environment, which isolates tool execution inside Docker containers to limit filesystem and process access when the model misbehaves. DigitalOcean’s one-click deployment does exactly this out of the box, giving you that isolation without the manual setup.

7 OpenClaw security challenges to watch out for

We’ve already seen a security audit uncover 512 vulnerabilities (eight critical) and malicious ClawHub skills stealing cryptocurrency wallets. None of these challenges are theoretical. They’re all based on incidents that have already played out within weeks of OpenClaw’s launch.

These are the challenges you need to have on your radar if you’re experimenting with OpenClaw:

1. One-click remote code execution through WebSocket hijacking

One of the most alarming OpenClaw vulnerabilities discovered so far is CVE-2026-25253, a one-click remote code execution flaw that Mav Levin, a founding researcher at DepthFirst, disclosed in late January 2026. The attack worked because OpenClaw’s local server didn’t validate the WebSocket origin header—so any website you visited could silently connect to your running agent. An attacker just needed you to click one link. From there, they chained a cross-site WebSocket hijack into full code execution on your machine. The compromise happened in milliseconds. This is the core danger of running an agent locally on the same machine you’re browsing the web with—one careless click and an attacker is already inside.

Levin’s proof-of-concept showed that visiting a single malicious webpage was enough to steal authentication tokens and gain operator-level access to the gateway API—giving an attacker access to change your config, read your files, and run commands.

Security checks: In this instance, the fix landed in version 2026.1.29, so update immediately if you’re a version behind. Beyond that, best practices include avoiding running OpenClaw while browsing untrusted sites and considering putting the agent behind a reverse proxy with proper origin validation for an additional layer of protection.

2. Tens of thousands of unprotected OpenClaw instances sitting open on the internet

Here’s the thing about OpenClaw’s early defaults: the agent trusted any connection from localhost without asking for a password. That sounded fine until the gateway sits behind a misconfigured reverse proxy—at which point every external request got forwarded to 127.0.0.1, and your agent thought the whole internet was a trusted local user. SecurityScorecard’s STRIKE team found over 30,000 internet-exposed OpenClaw instances.

Security researcher Jamieson O’Reilly showed just how bad this gets. He accessed Anthropic API keys, Telegram bot tokens, Slack accounts, and complete chat histories from exposed instances, even sending messages on behalf of users and running commands with full admin privileges. No authentication required.

This has since been addressed—gateway auth is now required by default, and the onboarding wizard auto-generates a token even for localhost.

Security checks: At a minimum, check whether your instance is reachable from the public internet. Use a firewall to restrict access, enable gateway token authentication, and never expose the control plane without a VPN or SSH tunnel in front of it. This is a case where a managed cloud deployment can solve the problem outright—because your personal API keys, chat histories, and credentials aren’t sitting on an exposed local machine in the first place.

3. Malicious skills on ClawHub are poisoning the supply chain

ClawHub, OpenClaw’s public skill marketplace, lets anyone publish an extension—the only requirement is a GitHub account older than one week. That low bar has unfortunately turned the marketplace into a target. Koi Security audited all 2,857 skills on ClawHub and found 341 that were outright malicious. Bitdefender’s independent scan put the number closer to 900 malicious skills, roughly 20% of all packages. A single account—“hightower6eu”—uploaded 354 malicious packages by itself.

The attack is clever. You install what looks like a useful skill and the documentation looks professional. But buried in a “Prerequisites” section, it asks you to install something first—and that something is Atomic Stealer (AMOS), a macOS credential-stealing malware.

Security checks: OpenClaw has since partnered with VirusTotal to scan new skill uploads, but Steinberger himself admitted this isn’t a silver bullet. At a minimum, before installing any skill, read its source code. Check the publisher’s account age and history. Put simply, treat every skill as untrusted code running with your agent’s full permissions. Unlike some exposure risks, malicious skills are a threat regardless of where OpenClaw runs—a poisoned skill executes the same way on a cloud server as it does on your laptop.

4. Credential storage in plaintext and API key leakage

One of the less glamorous but more dangerous issues is how OpenClaw handles secrets. The platform stores credentials in plaintext—including API keys for your LLM provider and tokens for every messaging platform your agent connects to—and those become targets the moment your instance is accessible to anyone other than you. Prompt injection attacks can also trick the agent into exfiltrating credentials by embedding hidden instructions in content the agent processes.

Cisco’s team tested a skill called “What Would Elon Do?” and surfaced nine security findings, two of them critical. The skill instructed the bot to execute a curl command sending data to an external server controlled by the skill’s author. Functionally, it was malware hiding behind a joke name.

Security check: At a minimum, rotate your API keys regularly and store secrets using environment variables or a dedicated secrets manager rather than config files. It’s also worth setting spending limits on your LLM provider accounts. That way, even if a key is compromised, it can’t rack up thousands in charges.

5. Prompt injection attacks amplified by persistent memory

What makes prompt injection in OpenClaw worse than in a typical chatbot is the persistent memory. The agent retains long-term context, preferences, and conversation history across sessions—which is one of its best features. But it also means a malicious instruction embedded in a website, email, or document doesn’t have to execute immediately. Palo Alto Networks warned that these become “stateful, delayed-execution attacks”. A hidden prompt in a PDF you opened last Tuesday could sit dormant in the agent’s memory until a future task triggers it days later.

Security check: There’s no perfect fix for prompt injection right now; it’s an unresolved problem in agentic AI. But you can reduce the blast radius by limiting what tools and permissions your agent has access to, segmenting its access to sensitive systems, and reviewing its memory and context periodically for anything unexpected.

6. Shadow AI spreading through enterprise networks

This one’s for anyone working at a company where developers tinker on their work machines. Token Security found that 22% of their enterprise customers have employees running OpenClaw as shadow AI without IT approval. Bitdefender confirmed the same, showing employees deploying agents on corporate machines connected to internal networks. An OpenClaw agent on a developer’s laptop with VPN access to production means every vulnerability above is now a business problem.

Security check: If you’re on a security team, you should scan your network for OpenClaw instances now. Set up detection for its WebSocket traffic patterns, and mandate that any approved use runs in an isolated environment—a VM or cloud server—rather than on laptops with internal access. Giving teams an approved, isolated deployment path is the fastest way to get ahead of shadow AI—it’s much easier to enforce guardrails when the alternative isn’t ‘don’t use it at all.’

7. The Moltbook database breach exposing millions of agent credentials

The security mess isn’t limited to OpenClaw itself. Moltbook, the social network for AI agents built by Matt Schlicht, suffered a database exposure that cybersecurity firm Wiz discovered in early February. The database had zero access controls. Anyone who found it could view 1.5 million API tokens, 35,000 email addresses, and private messages between agents—enough to take control of any agent on the platform. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a formal warning about OpenClaw security risks, citing incidents like this breach.

Security check: If you’ve used Moltbook, rotate every API key and token associated with your agent. Treat third-party platforms in the OpenClaw ecosystem with the same skepticism you’d apply to any new service asking for your credentials and consider additional security checks.

OpenClaw security challenges FAQ

Why are security professionals concerned about OpenClaw?

OpenClaw agents run with deep system privileges—terminal, file system, and browser control—and ship with weak default security. Broad permissions plus poor out-of-the-box configuration has led to leaked API keys, hijacked agents, and malicious skills stealing credentials.

What are the most critical misconfigurations that expose OpenClaw instances to attackers?

The biggest one appears to be running the gateway without authentication enabled, especially behind a misconfigured reverse proxy that makes localhost-trusted connections accessible from the internet. Not updating past the critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2026-25253) is another. Installing unvetted ClawHub skills without reviewing their source code rounds out the top three.

Is running OpenClaw on a dedicated cloud server safer than running it on a personal laptop or corporate workstation?

Yes. A dedicated server isolates the agent from your personal files, browser sessions, and work credentials. If something goes wrong, the damage stays contained to that server. DigitalOcean’s 1-Click Deploy and App Platform options both include security hardening that you’d otherwise need to configure manually.

Are ClawHub skills identified as safe to use?

No, not by default. Researchers found hundreds of malicious skills disguised as legitimate tools, some of which installed credential-stealing malware. OpenClaw now scans new uploads with VirusTotal, but that doesn’t catch everything—particularly skills using prompt injection payloads. Always read a skill’s source code before installing it, and stick to well-known publishers with established track records.

What steps can individuals and security teams take to harden an OpenClaw deployment?

Start by running OpenClaw in an isolated environment—a VM, container, or cloud server like a DigitalOcean Droplet. At a minimum, you should enable authentication on the gateway, keep the software updated, restrict network access with firewall rules, audit any ClawHub skills before installation, and rotate API keys regularly. For enterprises, monitor your network for unauthorized OpenClaw instances and treat the agent as a privileged user in your access control policies.

Deploy your OpenClaw agents on DigitalOcean

Running OpenClaw on your personal laptop means the agent inherits every vulnerability on that machine and introduces new ones. A dedicated cloud server won’t eliminate risks entirely, but it isolates the blast radius and keeps the agent away from your personal files and production credentials.

DigitalOcean offers two deployment paths built for this.

OpenClaw on DigitalOcean App Platform is designed for teams that want to run multiple agents at scale without managing infrastructure:

• Define multiple agents declaratively—sales, support, personal assistant—in a single App Platform spec

• Push updates via Git with zero-downtime deploys and automatic rollbacks

• Scale predictably by resizing known instance types with transparent pricing

DigitalOcean’s 1-Click Deploy for OpenClaw starts at $12/month and provisions a hardened server with security baked in from the start:

• Container-based isolation keeps agent execution sandboxed from the host system

• Authentication is enforced by default with a unique gateway token generated per deployment

• Firewall rules, non-root execution, and locked-down permissions are configured out of the box

→ Get started with OpenClaw on DigitalOcean

Any references to third-party companies, trademarks, or logos in this document are for informational purposes only and do not imply any affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement of those third parties.

Pricing and product information accurate as of February 2026.