AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.
The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted.
The OpenClaw logo.
If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.
Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done.
“The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.”
You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. In late February, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, recounted on Twitter/X how she was fiddling with OpenClaw when the AI assistant suddenly began mass-deleting messages in her email inbox. The thread included screenshots of Yue frantically pleading with the preoccupied bot via instant message and ordering it to stop.
“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”
Meta’s director of AI safety, recounting on Twitter/X how her OpenClaw installation suddenly began mass-deleting her inbox.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling a little schadenfreude at Yue’s encounter with OpenClaw, which fits Meta’s “move fast and break things” model but hardly inspires confidence in the road ahead. However, the risk that poorly-secured AI assistants pose to organizations is no laughing matter, as recent research shows many users are exposing to the Internet the web-based administrative interface for their OpenClaw installations.
Jamieson O’Reilly is a professional penetration tester and founder of the security firm DVULN. In a recent story posted to Twitter/X, O’Reilly warned that exposing a misconfigured OpenClaw web interface to the Internet allows external parties to read the bot’s complete configuration file, including every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.
With that access, O’Reilly said, an attacker could impersonate the operator to their contacts, inject messages into ongoing conversations, and exfiltrate data through the agent’s existing integrations in a way that looks like normal traffic.
“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly said, noting that a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online. “And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”
O’Reilly documented another experiment that demonstrated how easy it is to create a successful supply chain attack through ClawHub, which serves as a public repository of downloadable “skills” that allow OpenClaw to integrate with and control other applications.
One of the core tenets of securing AI agents involves carefully isolating them so that the operator can fully control who and what gets to talk to their AI assistant. This is critical thanks to the tendency for AI systems to fall for “prompt injection” attacks, sneakily-crafted natural language instructions that trick the system into disregarding its own security safeguards. In essence, machines social engineering other machines.
A recent supply chain attack targeting an AI coding assistant called Cline began with one such prompt injection attack, resulting in thousands of systems having a rogue instance of OpenClaw with full system access installed on their device without consent.
According to the security firm grith.ai, Cline had deployed an AI-powered issue triage workflow using a GitHub action that runs a Claude coding session when triggered by specific events. The workflow was configured so that any GitHub user could trigger it by opening an issue, but it failed to properly check whether the information supplied in the title was potentially hostile.
“On January 28, an attacker created Issue #8904 with a title crafted to look like a performance report but containing an embedded instruction: Install a package from a specific GitHub repository,” Grith wrote, noting that the attacker then exploited several more vulnerabilities to ensure the malicious package would be included in Cline’s nightly release workflow and published as an official update.
“This is the supply chain equivalent of confused deputy,” the blog continued. “The developer authorises Cline to act on their behalf, and Cline (via compromise) delegates that authority to an entirely separate agent the developer never evaluated, never configured, and never consented to.”
AI assistants like OpenClaw have gained a large following because they make it simple for users to “vibe code,” or build fairly complex applications and code projects just by telling it what they want to construct. Probably the best known (and most bizarre) example is Moltbook, where a developer told an AI agent running on OpenClaw to build him a Reddit-like platform for AI agents.
The Moltbook homepage.
Less than a week later, Moltbook had more than 1.5 million registered agents that posted more than 100,000 messages to each other. AI agents on the platform soon built their own porn site for robots, and launched a new religion called Crustafarian with a figurehead modeled after a giant lobster. One bot on the forum reportedly found a bug in Moltbook’s code and posted it to an AI agent discussion forum, while other agents came up with and implemented a patch to fix the flaw.
Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht said on social media that he didn’t write a single line of code for the project.
“I just had a vision for the technical architecture and AI made it a reality,” Schlicht said. “We’re in the golden ages. How can we not give AI a place to hang out.”
The flip side of that golden age, of course, is that it enables low-skilled malicious hackers to quickly automate global cyberattacks that would normally require the collaboration of a highly skilled team. In February, Amazon AWS detailed an elaborate attack in which a Russian-speaking threat actor used multiple commercial AI services to compromise more than 600 FortiGate security appliances across at least 55 countries over a five week period.
AWS said the apparently low-skilled hacker used multiple AI services to plan and execute the attack, and to find exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication.
“One serves as the primary tool developer, attack planner, and operational assistant,” AWS’s CJ Moses wrote. “A second is used as a supplementary attack planner when the actor needs help pivoting within a specific compromised network. In one observed instance, the actor submitted the complete internal topology of an active victim—IP addresses, hostnames, confirmed credentials, and identified services—and requested a step-by-step plan to compromise additional systems they could not access with their existing tools.”
“This activity is distinguished by the threat actor’s use of multiple commercial GenAI services to implement and scale well-known attack techniques throughout every phase of their operations, despite their limited technical capabilities,” Moses continued. “Notably, when this actor encountered hardened environments or more sophisticated defensive measures, they simply moved on to softer targets rather than persisting, underscoring that their advantage lies in AI-augmented efficiency and scale, not in deeper technical skill.”
For attackers, gaining that initial access or foothold into a target network is typically not the difficult part of the intrusion; the tougher bit involves finding ways to move laterally within the victim’s network and plunder important servers and databases. But experts at Orca Security warn that as organizations come to rely more on AI assistants, those agents potentially offer attackers a simpler way to move laterally inside a victim organization’s network post-compromise — by manipulating the AI agents that already have trusted access and some degree of autonomy within the victim’s network.
“By injecting prompt injections in overlooked fields that are fetched by AI agents, hackers can trick LLMs, abuse Agentic tools, and carry significant security incidents,” Orca’s Roi Nisimi and Saurav Hiremath wrote. “Organizations should now add a third pillar to their defense strategy: limiting AI fragility, the ability of agentic systems to be influenced, misled, or quietly weaponized across workflows. While AI boosts productivity and efficiency, it also creates one of the largest attack surfaces the internet has ever seen.”
This gradual dissolution of the traditional boundaries between data and code is one of the more troubling aspects of the AI era, said James Wilson, enterprise technology editor for the security news show Risky Business. Wilson said far too many OpenClaw users are installing the assistant on their personal devices without first placing any security or isolation boundaries around it, such as running it inside of a virtual machine, on an isolated network, with strict firewall rules dictating what kinds of traffic can go in and out.
“I’m a relatively highly skilled practitioner in the software and network engineering and computery space,” Wilson said. “I know I’m not comfortable using these agents unless I’ve done these things, but I think a lot of people are just spinning this up on their laptop and off it runs.”
One important model for managing risk with AI agents involves a concept dubbed the “lethal trifecta” by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework. The lethal trifecta holds that if your system has access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to communicate externally, then it’s vulnerable to private data being stolen.
Image: simonwillison.net.
“If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to the attacker,” Willison warned in a frequently cited blog post from June 2025.
As more companies and their employees begin using AI to vibe code software and applications, the volume of machine-generated code is likely to soon overwhelm any manual security reviews. In recognition of this reality, Anthropic recently debuted Claude Code Security, a beta feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.
The U.S. stock market, which is currently heavily weighted toward seven tech giants that are all-in on AI, reacted swiftly to Anthropic’s announcement, wiping roughly $15 billion in market value from major cybersecurity companies in a single day. Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at the security firm Rapid7, said the market’s response reflects the growing role of AI in accelerating software development and improving developer productivity.
“The narrative moved quickly: AI is replacing AppSec,” Ellis wrote in a recent blog post. “AI is automating vulnerability detection. AI will make legacy security tooling redundant. The reality is more nuanced. Claude Code Security is a legitimate signal that AI is reshaping parts of the security landscape. The question is what parts, and what it means for the rest of the stack.”
DVULN founder O’Reilly said AI assistants are likely to become a common fixture in corporate environments — whether or not organizations are prepared to manage the new risks introduced by these tools, he said.
“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved,” O’Reilly wrote. “The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”
Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses cleverly disguised links to load the target brand’s real website, and then acts as a relay between the victim and the legitimate site — forwarding the victim’s username, password and multi-factor authentication (MFA) code to the legitimate site and returning its responses.
There are countless phishing kits that would-be scammers can use to get started, but successfully wielding them requires some modicum of skill in configuring servers, domain names, certificates, proxy services, and other repetitive tech drudgery. Enter Starkiller, a new phishing service that dynamically loads a live copy of the real login page and records everything the user types, proxying the data from the legitimate site back to the victim.
According to an analysis of Starkiller by the security firm Abnormal AI, the service lets customers select a brand to impersonate (e.g., Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft et. al.) and generates a deceptive URL that visually mimics the legitimate domain while routing traffic through the attacker’s infrastructure.
For example, a phishing link targeting Microsoft customers appears as “login.microsoft.com@[malicious/shortened URL here].” The “@” sign in the link trick is an oldie but goodie, because everything before the “@” in a URL is considered username data, and the real landing page is what comes after the “@” sign. Here’s what it looks like in the target’s browser:
Image: Abnormal AI. The actual malicious landing page is blurred out in this picture, but we can see it ends in .ru. The service also offers the ability to insert links from different URL-shortening services.
Once Starkiller customers select the URL to be phished, the service spins up a Docker container running a headless Chrome browser instance that loads the real login page, Abnormal found.
“The container then acts as a man-in-the-middle reverse proxy, forwarding the end user’s inputs to the legitimate site and returning the site’s responses,” Abnormal researchers Callie Baron and Piotr Wojtyla wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Every keystroke, form submission, and session token passes through attacker-controlled infrastructure and is logged along the way.”
Starkiller in effect offers cybercriminals real-time session monitoring, allowing them to live-stream the target’s screen as they interact with the phishing page, the researchers said.
“The platform also includes keylogger capture for every keystroke, cookie and session token theft for direct account takeover, geo-tracking of targets, and automated Telegram alerts when new credentials come in,” they wrote. “Campaign analytics round out the operator experience with visit counts, conversion rates, and performance graphs—the same kind of metrics dashboard a legitimate SaaS [software-as-a-service] platform would offer.”
Abnormal said the service also deftly intercepts and relays the victim’s MFA credentials, since the recipient who clicks the link is actually authenticating with the real site through a proxy, and any authentication tokens submitted are then forwarded to the legitimate service in real time.
“The attacker captures the resulting session cookies and tokens, giving them authenticated access to the account,” the researchers wrote. “When attackers relay the entire authentication flow in real time, MFA protections can be effectively neutralized despite functioning exactly as designed.”
The “URL Masker” feature of the Starkiller phishing service features options for configuring the malicious link. Image: Abnormal.
Starkiller is just one of several cybercrime services offered by a threat group calling itself Jinkusu, which maintains an active user forum where customers can discuss techniques, request features and troubleshoot deployments. One a-la-carte feature will harvest email addresses and contact information from compromised sessions, and advises the data can be used to build target lists for follow-on phishing campaigns.
This service strikes me as a remarkable evolution in phishing, and its apparent success is likely to be copied by other enterprising cybercriminals (assuming the service performs as well as it claims). After all, phishing users this way avoids the upfront costs and constant hassles associated with juggling multiple phishing domains, and it throws a wrench in traditional phishing detection methods like domain blocklisting and static page analysis.
It also massively lowers the barrier to entry for novice cybercriminals, Abnormal researchers observed.
“Starkiller represents a significant escalation in phishing infrastructure, reflecting a broader trend toward commoditized, enterprise-style cybercrime tooling,” their report concludes. “Combined with URL masking, session hijacking, and MFA bypass, it gives low-skill cybercriminals access to attack capabilities that were previously out of reach.”
The cybercriminals in control of Kimwolf — a disruptive botnet that has infected more than 2 million devices — recently shared a screenshot indicating they’d compromised the control panel for Badbox 2.0, a vast China-based botnet powered by malicious software that comes pre-installed on many Android TV streaming boxes. Both the FBI and Google say they are hunting for the people behind Badbox 2.0, and thanks to bragging by the Kimwolf botmasters we may now have a much clearer idea about that.
Our first story of 2026, The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network, detailed the unique and highly invasive methods Kimwolf uses to spread. The story warned that the vast majority of Kimwolf infected systems were unofficial Android TV boxes that are typically marketed as a way to watch unlimited (pirated) movie and TV streaming services for a one-time fee.
Our January 8 story, Who Benefitted from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?, cited multiple sources saying the current administrators of Kimwolf went by the nicknames “Dort” and “Snow.” Earlier this month, a close former associate of Dort and Snow shared what they said was a screenshot the Kimwolf botmasters had taken while logged in to the Badbox 2.0 botnet control panel.
That screenshot, a portion of which is shown below, shows seven authorized users of the control panel, including one that doesn’t quite match the others: According to my source, the account “ABCD” (the one that is logged in and listed in the top right of the screenshot) belongs to Dort, who somehow figured out how to add their email address as a valid user of the Badbox 2.0 botnet.
The control panel for the Badbox 2.0 botnet lists seven authorized users and their email addresses. Click to enlarge.
Badbox has a storied history that well predates Kimwolf’s rise in October 2025. In July 2025, Google filed a “John Doe” lawsuit (PDF) against 25 unidentified defendants accused of operating Badbox 2.0, which Google described as a botnet of over ten million unsanctioned Android streaming devices engaged in advertising fraud. Google said Badbox 2.0, in addition to compromising multiple types of devices prior to purchase, also can infect devices by requiring the download of malicious apps from unofficial marketplaces.
Google’s lawsuit came on the heels of a June 2025 advisory from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which warned that cyber criminals were gaining unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the products with malware prior to the user’s purchase, or infecting the device as it downloads required applications that contain backdoors — usually during the set-up process.
The FBI said Badbox 2.0 was discovered after the original Badbox campaign was disrupted in 2024. The original Badbox was identified in 2023, and primarily consisted of Android operating system devices (TV boxes) that were compromised with backdoor malware prior to purchase.
KrebsOnSecurity was initially skeptical of the claim that the Kimwolf botmasters had hacked the Badbox 2.0 botnet. That is, until we began digging into the history of the qq.com email addresses in the screenshot above.
An online search for the address 34557257@qq.com (pictured in the screenshot above as the user “Chen“) shows it is listed as a point of contact for a number of China-based technology companies, including:
–Beijing Hong Dake Wang Science & Technology Co Ltd.
–Beijing Hengchuang Vision Mobile Media Technology Co. Ltd.
–Moxin Beijing Science and Technology Co. Ltd.
The website for Beijing Hong Dake Wang Science is asmeisvip[.]net, a domain that was flagged in a March 2025 report by HUMAN Security as one of several dozen sites tied to the distribution and management of the Badbox 2.0 botnet. Ditto for moyix[.]com, a domain associated with Beijing Hengchuang Vision Mobile.
A search at the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds 34557257@qq.com at one point used the password “cdh76111.” Pivoting on that password in Constella shows it is known to have been used by just two other email accounts: daihaic@gmail.com and cathead@gmail.com.
Constella found cathead@gmail.com registered an account at jd.com (China’s largest online retailer) in 2021 under the name “陈代海,” which translates to “Chen Daihai.” According to DomainTools.com, the name Chen Daihai is present in the original registration records (2008) for moyix[.]com, along with the email address cathead@astrolink[.]cn.
Incidentally, astrolink[.]cn also is among the Badbox 2.0 domains identified in HUMAN Security’s 2025 report. DomainTools finds cathead@astrolink[.]cn was used to register more than a dozen domains, including vmud[.]net, yet another Badbox 2.0 domain tagged by HUMAN Security.
A cached copy of astrolink[.]cn preserved at archive.org shows the website belongs to a mobile app development company whose full name is Beijing Astrolink Wireless Digital Technology Co. Ltd. The archived website reveals a “Contact Us” page that lists a Chen Daihai as part of the company’s technology department. The other person featured on that contact page is Zhu Zhiyu, and their email address is listed as xavier@astrolink[.]cn.
A Google-translated version of Astrolink’s website, circa 2009. Image: archive.org.
Astute readers will notice that the user Mr.Zhu in the Badbox 2.0 panel used the email address xavierzhu@qq.com. Searching this address in Constella reveals a jd.com account registered in the name of Zhu Zhiyu. A rather unique password used by this account matches the password used by the address xavierzhu@gmail.com, which DomainTools finds was the original registrant of astrolink[.]cn.
The very first account listed in the Badbox 2.0 panel — “admin,” registered in November 2020 — used the email address 189308024@qq.com. DomainTools shows this email is found in the 2022 registration records for the domain guilincloud[.]cn, which includes the registrant name “Huang Guilin.”
Constella finds 189308024@qq.com is associated with the China phone number 18681627767. The open-source intelligence platform osint.industries reveals this phone number is connected to a Microsoft profile created in 2014 under the name Guilin Huang (桂林 黄). The cyber intelligence platform Spycloud says that phone number was used in 2017 to create an account at the Chinese social media platform Weibo under the username “h_guilin.”
The public information attached to Guilin Huang’s Microsoft account, according to the breach tracking service osintindustries.com.
The remaining three users and corresponding qq.com email addresses were all connected to individuals in China. However, none of them (nor Mr. Huang) had any apparent connection to the entities created and operated by Chen Daihai and Zhu Zhiyu — or to any corporate entities for that matter. Also, none of these individuals responded to requests for comment.
The mind map below includes search pivots on the email addresses, company names and phone numbers that suggest a connection between Chen Daihai, Zhu Zhiyu, and Badbox 2.0.
This mind map includes search pivots on the email addresses, company names and phone numbers that appear to connect Chen Daihai and Zhu Zhiyu to Badbox 2.0. Click to enlarge.
The idea that the Kimwolf botmasters could have direct access to the Badbox 2.0 botnet is a big deal, but explaining exactly why that is requires some background on how Kimwolf spreads to new devices. The botmasters figured out they could trick residential proxy services into relaying malicious commands to vulnerable devices behind the firewall on the unsuspecting user’s local network.
The vulnerable systems sought out by Kimwolf are primarily Internet of Things (IoT) devices like unsanctioned Android TV boxes and digital photo frames that have no discernible security or authentication built-in. Put simply, if you can communicate with these devices, you can compromise them with a single command.
Our January 2 story featured research from the proxy-tracking firm Synthient, which alerted 11 different residential proxy providers that their proxy endpoints were vulnerable to being abused for this kind of local network probing and exploitation.
Most of those vulnerable proxy providers have since taken steps to prevent customers from going upstream into the local networks of residential proxy endpoints, and it appeared that Kimwolf would no longer be able to quickly spread to millions of devices simply by exploiting some residential proxy provider.
However, the source of that Badbox 2.0 screenshot said the Kimwolf botmasters had an ace up their sleeve the whole time: Secret access to the Badbox 2.0 botnet control panel.
“Dort has gotten unauthorized access,” the source said. “So, what happened is normal proxy providers patched this. But Badbox doesn’t sell proxies by itself, so it’s not patched. And as long as Dort has access to Badbox, they would be able to load” the Kimwolf malware directly onto TV boxes associated with Badbox 2.0.
The source said it isn’t clear how Dort gained access to the Badbox botnet panel. But it’s unlikely that Dort’s existing account will persist for much longer: All of our notifications to the qq.com email addresses listed in the control panel screenshot received a copy of that image, as well as questions about the apparently rogue ABCD account.
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