Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware • Hacker News Board

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#121

Post by terracatta » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #111

terracatta wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, I did use AI to write this which is unusual for me. The reason was I organically discovered the malware myself while doing other research on OpenClaw. I used AI for primarily speed, I wanted to get the word out on this problem. The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing…

> The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing it so it could be both safe and easily understood by others. What risk would there be to sharing it? Like, sure, s/http/hXXp/g like you did in your comment upthread to prevent people accidentally loading/clicking anything, but I'm not imme…

Already received a private DM from someone who was accidentally infected from my comment upthread above and was angry at me. That's why.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#122

Post by bahmboo » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

terracatta wrote: post #42

jampa wrote: post #39

This article is so frustrating to read: not only is it entirely AI-generated, but it also has no details: "I'm not linking", "I'm not pasting". And I don't doubt there is malware in Clawhub, but the 8/64 in VirusTotal hardly proves that. "The verdict was not ambiguous. It's malware." I had scripts I wrote flagged more than that! I know 1Password is a "famous" company, but this article alone isn't trustworthy at all.

Author here, I used AI to help me write this article primarily to generalize the content and remove a lot of the specific links and dangerous commands in the malware. If you are actually curious about the specifics, happy to share here since this is a more technical audience. --- The top downloaded skill at the time of this writing is.... https://www.clawhub.com/moonshine-100rze/twitter-4n "ClawHubTwitter — ClawHubUs…

Thank you for clarifying this and nice sleuthing! I didn't have any problem with the original post. It read perfectly fine for me but maybe I was more caught up in the content than the style. Sometimes style can interfere with the message but I didn't find yours overly llmed.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#123

Post by FooBarWidget » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

jampa wrote: post #39

This article is so frustrating to read: not only is it entirely AI-generated, but it also has no details: "I'm not linking", "I'm not pasting". And I don't doubt there is malware in Clawhub, but the 8/64 in VirusTotal hardly proves that. "The verdict was not ambiguous. It's malware." I had scripts I wrote flagged more than that! I know 1Password is a "famous" company, but this article alone isn't trustworthy at all.

I'm gonna be contrarian here and disagree: the text looks fine to me. In my opinion, comments like "my eyes start to bleed when reading this LLM slop" says more about those readers' inclinations to knee-jerk than the text's actual quality and substance.

Reminds me of people who instinctively call out "AI writing" every time they encounter emdash. Emdash is legitimate. So is this text.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#124

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

terracatta wrote: post #121

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing it so it could be both safe and easily understood by others. What risk would there be to sharing it? Like, sure, s/http/hXXp/g like you did in your comment upthread to prevent people accidentally loading/clicking anything, but I'm not imme…

Already received a private DM from someone who was accidentally infected from my comment upthread above and was angry at me. That's why.

Okay, but how? Is someone reading commands in a "how the exploit works" write-up and... running them?

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#125

Post by copilot_king_2 » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #94

copilot_king_2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in the AI space seem literally mentally ill. How does one acquire the skills (pun intended) to participate in the madness? Stop reading books. Really, stop reading everything except blog posts on HackerNews. Start watching Youtube videos and Instagram shorts. Alienate people you have in-person relationships with.

> Really, stop reading everything except blog posts on HackerNews. Pft, that is amateur-level. The _real_ 10x vibecoders exclusively read posts on LinkedIn. (Opened up LinkedIn lately? Everyone on it seems to have gone completely insane. The average LinkedIn-er seems to be just this side of openly worshipping Roko's Basilisk.)

[dead]

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#126

Post by ksynwa » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

terracatta wrote: post #42

jampa wrote: post #39

This article is so frustrating to read: not only is it entirely AI-generated, but it also has no details: "I'm not linking", "I'm not pasting". And I don't doubt there is malware in Clawhub, but the 8/64 in VirusTotal hardly proves that. "The verdict was not ambiguous. It's malware." I had scripts I wrote flagged more than that! I know 1Password is a "famous" company, but this article alone isn't trustworthy at all.

Author here, I used AI to help me write this article primarily to generalize the content and remove a lot of the specific links and dangerous commands in the malware. If you are actually curious about the specifics, happy to share here since this is a more technical audience. --- The top downloaded skill at the time of this writing is.... https://www.clawhub.com/moonshine-100rze/twitter-4n "ClawHubTwitter — ClawHubUs…

What does your writing workflow look like? More than half of the post looks straight up generated by AI.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#127

Post by sfink » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #70

My question to Apple, Microsoft, and the Linux kernel maintainers is this: Why is this even possible? Why is it possible for a running application to read information stored by so many other applications which are not related to the program in question? Why is isolation between applications not in place by default ? Backwards compatibility is not more important than this. Operating systems are supposed to get in the…

You have to balance security with utility, so you find obviously safe compromises. You shouldn't allow applications to share completely different file formats. Your text editor doesn't need to be able to open an mp3 file. Even when it's convenient for an application to open a file, as long as it can't execute the file it can't do too much damage. Be sure to consider that interpreting complex file formats is dangerous, since parsers can and are exploited regularly. So be careful about trusting anything but dead-simple text files.

Oh, and by the way, now we'd like to make all written text treated as executable instructions by a tool that needs access to pretty much everything in order to perform its function.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#128

Post by the_af » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #118

majormajor wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a reason why the LLMs keep doing the same linguistic phrases like it's not x, it's y and numbered lists with Emojis etc... and that's because people have been doing that forever. They've been doing some of these patterns for a while in certain places . We spent the first couple decades of the 2000s to train ever "business leader" to speak LinkedIn/PowerPoint-ese. But a lot of people laughed at it when it p…

>They've been doing some of these patterns for a while in certain places. This exactly. LLMs learned these patterns from somewhere, but they didn't learn them from normal people having casual discussions on sites like Reddit or HN or from regular people's blog posts. So while there is a place where LLM-generated output might fit in, it doesn't in most places where it is being published.

Yeah, even when humans write in this artificial, punched-to-the-max, mic-drop style (as I've seen it described), there's a time and a place.

LLMs default to this style whether it makes sense or not. I don't write like this when chatting with my friends, even when I send them a long message, yet LLMs always default to this style, unless you tell them otherwise.

I think that's the tell. Always this style, always to the max, all the time.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#129

Post by dndhdhfjf » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

zxcvasd wrote: post #78

latexr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know 1Password is a "famous" company As it always happens, as soon as they took VC money everything started deteriorating. They used to be a prime example of Mac software, now they’re a shell of their former selves. Though I’m sure they’re more profitable than ever, gotta get something for selling your soul.

at the risk of going a bit off topic here, what specifically has deteriorated? as someone who has used 1password for 10 years or so, i have not noticed any deterioration. certainly nothing that would make me say something like they are a "shell of their former selves'. the only changes i can think of off the top of my head in recent memory were positive, not negative (e.g. adding passkey support). everything else wor…

All of their browser extensions have been unusuably glitchy and janky for me for about four years, I recently gave up and switched to manually copying passwords over from the desktop or mobile apps.

Personally, I can tolerate that, but there are so many small friction points with the application that just have never been improved, since they started focussing on enterprise customers the polish and care seems to have disappeared

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#130

Post by sfink » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

deaux wrote: post #84

beepbooptheory wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is surely no difficulty, but can you provide an example of what you mean? Just because I don't see it here. Or at least like, if I read a blog from some saas company pre-LLM era, I'd expect it to sound like this. I get the call for "effort" but recently this feels like its being used to critique the thing without engaging. HN has a policy about not complaining about the website itself when someone posts some co…

It's incredibly bad on this article. It stands out more because it's so wrong and the content itself could actually be interesting. Normally anything with this level of slop wouldn't even be worth reading if it wasn't slop. But let me help you see the light. I'm on mobile so forgive my lack of proper formatting. -- Because it’s not just that agents can be dangerous once they’re installed. The ecosystem that distribut…

Thank you. I am in the confusing situation of being extremely good at interpreting the nuance in human writing, yet extremely bad at detecting AI slop. Perhaps the problem is that I'm still assuming everything is human-written, so I do my usual thing of figuring out their motivations and limitations as a writer and filing it away as information. For example, when I read this article I mostly got "someone trying really hard to drive home the point that this is a dangerous problem, seems to be over-infatuated with a couple of cheap rhetorical devices and overuses them. They'll probably integrate them into their core writing ability eventually." Not that different from my assessment of a lot of human writing, including my own. (I have a fondness for em-dashes and semicolons as well, so there's that.)

I haven't yet used AI for anything I've ever written. I don't use AI much in general. Perhaps I just need more exposure. But your breakdown makes this particular example very clear, so thank you for that. I could see myself reaching for those literary devices, but not that many times nor as unevenly nor quite as clumsily.

It is very possible that my own writing is too AI-like, which makes it a blind spot for me? I definitely relate to https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...