If you’re running OpenClaw, stop what you’re doing and read this.

Oasis Security’s research team published threat research today revealing a critical vulnerability chain in OpenClaw that enables attackers to achieve full workstation compromise — potentially including privilege escalation and credential theft — initiated entirely from a browser tab. This is a distinct and separate issue from the GHSA-mr32 CVE batch that was patched earlier this month.

Compounding the urgency: SecurityScorecard has identified more than 40,000 exposed OpenClaw instances accessible from the public internet.

What the Vulnerability Chain Does

Oasis Security’s research describes a multi-step attack chain, not a single CVE. The attack surface involves the way OpenClaw’s gateway service exposes its local API — specifically, how requests originating from a browser context can interact with the agent’s tool execution layer.

In a worst-case exploitation scenario:

  1. A malicious web page (or a page with injected content) sends crafted requests to the OpenClaw gateway listening on localhost
  2. The gateway’s authentication model — designed for local trusted use — doesn’t adequately validate the origin of these requests
  3. The attacker leverages the agent’s tool execution capabilities to run commands with the agent’s permission level
  4. Depending on how the agent is configured and what credentials are accessible to it, this can escalate to full workstation compromise

The attack requires the victim to have OpenClaw running with its gateway active and accessible — which is, notably, the default configuration for most users.

Why 40,000+ Exposed Instances Is Alarming

SecurityScorecard’s scan finding 40,000+ publicly exposed OpenClaw gateways compounds the severity dramatically. Most OpenClaw users run the gateway on a home network or workstation, expecting it to be inaccessible from the internet. But misconfigured routers, cloud VMs with default firewall rules, and direct internet connections mean a significant fraction of installs are exposed.

An exposed gateway — one reachable from a public IP — transforms this from a browser-based attack requiring the victim to visit a malicious page, to a network-reachable exploit that doesn’t require any user interaction at all.

What This Is NOT

To be clear: this is not the GHSA-mr32 batch that OpenClaw’s security team patched earlier in February. That batch addressed a different class of issues in the tool execution sandboxing layer. This vulnerability chain is new, and as of publication time, no patch has been confirmed publicly available for this specific chain.

Oasis Security followed responsible disclosure practices and coordinated with OpenClaw’s team before publishing. The OpenClaw team has acknowledged the report publicly.

Immediate Steps to Protect Yourself

While you wait for an official patch, there are concrete steps you can take right now:

1. Restrict gateway network access If you’re running the OpenClaw gateway, ensure it’s bound to 127.0.0.1 only, not 0.0.0.0. Check your ~/.openclaw/config.yaml or equivalent configuration file.

2. Enable authentication on the gateway OpenClaw’s gateway supports API key authentication. If you haven’t enabled it, do so immediately. An exposed unauthenticated gateway is the worst-case scenario here.

3. Check your firewall rules Ensure port 8765 (or whichever port you’ve configured for the gateway) is not reachable from the public internet. If you’re on a VPS or cloud instance, check your cloud provider’s security group rules.

4. Consider disabling the gateway when not in active use If you use OpenClaw interactively rather than as a persistent background service, stopping the gateway when you’re done eliminates the attack surface entirely.

5. Watch OpenClaw’s security advisories Follow the official advisory channel for patch announcements. When a fix is released, apply it immediately.

For a detailed hardening guide, see our companion how-to: How to Audit and Lock Down Your OpenClaw Instance Against the Oasis Security Vulnerability Chain.

The Broader Context

Today also saw the launch of IronCurtain, an open-source security wrapper for LLM agents that could partially mitigate some of the trust boundary issues that underlie this attack class. The timing is coincidental but apt — the OpenClaw vulnerability chain is a concrete demonstration of exactly why agent-level security tooling matters.

The MIT study we also covered today found that most agentic AI systems have no documented safety testing or shutdown controls. The OpenClaw vulnerability chain is a real-world consequence of that gap.

Sources

  1. PR Newswire — Oasis Security Research Team Discovers Critical Vulnerability in OpenClaw (2026-02-26)
  2. Infosecurity Magazine — 40,000+ exposed OpenClaw instances report (2026-02-26)
  3. AI Journal — Oasis Security vulnerability chain analysis (2026-02-26)
  4. OffSeq Threat Radar — OpenClaw attack chain technical breakdown (2026-02-26)
  5. Morningstar — Oasis Security press release syndication (2026-02-26)

Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260226-2000

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