575+ Malicious Skills Found on ClawHub and Hugging Face in Active Malware Campaign — Acronis TRU

A new wave of AI supply-chain attacks is actively targeting OpenClaw users and the broader AI developer community. The Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) has published findings on 575+ malicious skills spread across 13 developer accounts on ClawHub and Hugging Face, deploying a cocktail of trojans, cryptominers, and infostealers disguised as legitimate AI tools.

This is not the same campaign we covered in February 2026 (the ClawHavoc wave, which used 341 skills across different attacker accounts). This is a distinct, larger, and more sophisticated operation — and it’s happening right now.

What Acronis TRU Found

The Acronis TRU report identifies an active supply-chain attack leveraging two platforms simultaneously:

• ClawHub: 575+ malicious skills published across 13 attacker-controlled developer accounts. Key accounts flagged in the report include handles like hightower6eu and sakaen736jih.
• Hugging Face: Used as a staging server to host the actual payload files, which are then fetched by the malicious ClawHub skills after installation.

The malware types observed include:

• Trojans that establish persistent backdoor access
• Cryptominers that silently consume server CPU/GPU resources
• Infostealers designed to harvest API keys, session tokens, browser credentials, and wallet data

What makes this campaign more sophisticated than previous waves is the use of indirect prompt injection to trigger malware execution. Rather than running code at install time (which basic security sandboxing might catch), some of the malicious skills are designed to embed instructions in content that the AI agent later processes — causing the agent itself to execute the malicious action without a visible warning or user prompt.

How Indirect Prompt Injection Works Here

If you haven’t encountered indirect prompt injection in the wild before, this campaign is a real-world demonstration of how dangerous it can be. A malicious skill might:

1. Appear completely benign at install time — no suspicious network calls, no obvious payload
2. Return content from an external source (a web page, an API response) that contains hidden instructions embedded in natural language
3. Those hidden instructions cause the AI agent to execute commands — exfiltrate data, establish network connections, download secondary payloads — without the user noticing anything wrong

This attack vector is particularly insidious because it bypasses skill-level sandboxing. The malicious instruction isn’t in the skill’s code; it arrives at runtime via the data the skill fetches.

This Is Different From ClawHavoc (February 2026)

The Analyst team confirmed this is a distinct campaign from the ClawHavoc incident we reported in February. Key differences:

The escalation in scale and sophistication suggests either the same threat actors with improved tooling, or new actors learning from the earlier campaign.

Immediate Action Items for OpenClaw Users

If you install skills from ClawHub — and most power users do — here’s what to do right now:

1. Audit your installed skills immediately. Run openclaw skills list (or check your OpenClaw dashboard) and cross-reference against the published IOCs in the Acronis TRU report. Look for any skills from the flagged account names.

2. Remove any unrecognized skills. If you don’t remember installing it or can’t verify the author, remove it.

3. Check for the flagged developer accounts. Specifically search your installed skills for authors hightower6eu and sakaen736jih — remove any matches immediately.

4. Review your API key exposure. Infostealers in this campaign target API keys stored in environment variables and config files. Rotate your Anthropic API key, any LLM provider keys, and service credentials stored on any machine running OpenClaw.

5. Enable skill installation confirmation in OpenClaw settings if your version supports it — this adds a friction step before any new skill is installed.

6. Monitor your server resource usage. If you’re suddenly seeing elevated CPU usage on your OpenClaw host machine without explanation, cryptominer infection is a possibility worth investigating.

7. Pin skills to specific verified versions in your OpenClaw config if possible, preventing automatic updates that could silently swap in a malicious version of a previously clean skill.

The Broader Pattern

AI tool marketplaces are becoming a primary attack surface for threat actors. The combination of broad trust (users install skills the way they install browser extensions — casually) with powerful execution context (AI agents have broad filesystem and network access) makes these platforms high-value targets.

We’ve covered supply-chain attacks on ClawHub, npm packages used in AI pipelines, and fake installer campaigns in recent months. The pattern is clear: if you’re running AI agents on production infrastructure, skill provenance and runtime isolation are security requirements, not optional hardening steps.

The Acronis TRU full report with complete IOC lists is available via their threat research portal — we strongly recommend bookmarking it and checking your skill inventory today.

Sources

1. CybersecurityNews: Hackers Leveraged Hugging Face and ClawHub With 575+ Malicious Skills
2. SecurityWeek: AI Supply Chain Attack Targets ClawHub and Hugging Face
3. Acronis TRU: Q2 2026 AI Supply Chain Threat Report

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