OpenClaw Is Unsafe By Design

OpenClaw Is Unsafe By Design On February 17th, a popular VS Code extension called Cline got compromised. The attack chain reads like a catalog of AI-specific failure modes: Attacker opens a GitHub issue on Cline's repo Cline's AI-powered issue triage bot reads it Prompt injection in the issue content tricks the bot Bot poisons the GitHub Actions cache with malicious code CI pipeline steals VSCE_PAT, OVSX_PAT, and NPM_RELEASE_TOKEN Attacker publishes cline@2.3.0 with a postinstall script that runs npm install -g openclaw@latest ~4,000 developers install it in 8 hours before it's deprecated The malicious package was caught by StepSecurity's automated checks. Two red flags triggered immediately: the package was published manually (not via OIDC Trusted Publishing), and it had no npm provenance attestations. But here's the thing: the payload was OpenClaw. Not malware. Not a cryptominer. OpenClaw. And that's the problem. OpenClaw is the vulnerability. What Is OpenClaw? OpenClaw (formerly Cla