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Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

1password.com

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Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#81

Post by ryandrake »

terracatta wrote: post #45
danabramov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your parent that the AI writing style is incredibly frustrating. Is there a difficulty with making a pass, reading every sentence of what was written, and then rewriting in your own words when you see AI cliches? It makes it difficult to trust the substance when the lack of effort in form is evident.

Will do better next time.

Great that you are open to feedback! I wish every blogger could hear and internalize this but I'm just a lowly HN poster with no reach, so I'll just piss into the wind here:

You're probably a really good writer, and when you are a good writer, people want to hear your authentic voice. When an author uses AI, even "just a little to clean things up" it taints the whole piece. It's like they farted in the room. Everyone can smell it and everyone knows they did it. When I'm half way through an article and I smell it, I kind of just give up in disgust. If I wanted to hear what an LLM thought about a topic, I'd just ask an LLM--they are very accessible now. We go to HN and read blogs and articles because we want to hear what a human thinks about it.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#82

Post by Shank »

terracatta wrote: post #38
Shank wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jason Meller was the former CEO of Kolide, which 1Password bought. I doubt he's beholden to anything like word count requirements. There is human written text in here, but it's not all human written -- and odds are since this is basically an ad for 1Password's enterprise security offerings that this is mostly intended as marketing, not as a substantive article.

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…

As a longtime customer (I have my challenge coin right here), and fan of your writing, I do implore you to consider that your writing has value without AI. I would rather read an article with 1/5 the words that expresses your thoughts than something fluffed out.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#84

Post by deaux »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #65
danabramov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your parent that the AI writing style is incredibly frustrating. Is there a difficulty with making a pass, reading every sentence of what was written, and then rewriting in your own words when you see AI cliches? It makes it difficult to trust the substance when the lack of effort in form is evident.

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 distributes their capabilities and skill registries has already become an attack surface.

^ Okay, once can happen. At least he clearly rewrote the LLM output a little.

That means a malicious “skill” is not just an OpenClaw problem. It is a distribution mechanism that can travel across any agent ecosystem that supports the same standard.

^ Oh oh..

Markdown isn’t “content” in an agent ecosystem. Markdown is an installer.

^ Oh no.

The key point is that this was not “a suspicious link.” This was a complete execution chain disguised as setup instructions.

^ At this point my eyes start bleeding.

This is the type of malware that doesn’t just “infect your computer.” It raids everything valuable on that device

^ Please make it stop.

Skills need provenance. Execution needs mediation. Permissions need to be specific, revocable, and continuously enforced, not granted once and forgotten.

^ Here's what it taught me about B2B sales.

This wasn’t an isolated case. It was a campaign.

^ This isn't just any slop. It's ultraslop.

Not a one-off malicious upload.

A deliberate strategy: use “skills” as the distribution channel, and “prerequisites” as the social engineering wrapper.

^ Not your run-of-the-mill slop, but some of the worst slop.

--

I feel kind of sorry for making you see it, as it might deprive you of enjoying future slop. But you asked for it, and I'm happy to provide.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I imagine he'd give the same examples.

Personally, I couldn't care less if you use AI to help you write. I care about it not being the type of slurry that pre-AI was easily avoided by staying off of LinkedIn.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#85

Post by darkwater »

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…

Well the 1st link in your article on 1password.com, linking to another 1password.com post is literally: https://1password.com/blog/its-openclaw?utm_source=chatgpt.c...

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#86

Post by pandemic_region »

deaux wrote: post #75
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicion is that the problem here is pretty simple: people publishing articles that contain these kinds of LLM-ass LLMisms don't mind and don't notice them. I spotted this recently on Reddit. There are tons of very obviously bot-generated or LLM-written posts, but there are also always clearly real people in the comments who just don't realize that they're responding to a bot.

I see this by far the most on Github out of all places.

I am seeing it more and more here as well to be honest.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#87

Post by zxcvasd »

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…

>Operating systems are supposed to get in the way of things like this

debbie from accounting will say "darn thing wont let me do my job", and get frustrated from all of the prompts and approvals she doesnt understand. she is just going to click yes on every single prompt, not reading it. no meaningful security increase occurs.

debbies boss is going to get annoyed that debbies productivity has fallen 15% because she doesnt understand what her computer is asking for and she is having to stop what she is doing to hit some stupid prompt every 10 minutes. no meaningful security increase occurs.

tier 1 tech support will quit their jobs because now they arent just resetting hundreds of passwords each day, they have to listen to people yelling at them about their computer prompting for permissions every 10 minutes. "just hit yes whenever it shows up", they say. no meaningful security increase occurs.

neckbeard mcneckbeard on HN will screech "mIcRoSlOp thinks they know how to secure my computer better than me!! screeeeeee walled garden screeeeeeeeee if i bought it i should be able to do anything to it". mr. mcneckbeard is very vocal and causing all sorts of bad publicity. they hack some workarounds or change the settings so that they dont get prompted every 10 minutes. no meaningful security increase occurs. (side note: i ~mostly~ agree with mr mcneckbeard)

if security is not convenient, people will work around it, and you'll end up with even worse security because everything will be done in the shadows.

security an extreme balancing act. if the friction is too high, it will end up lowering security, not increasing it.

>Backwards compatibility is not more important than this

in more situations than you probably think, backwards compatibility is literally the most important thing.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#88

Post by terracatta »

Shank wrote: post #82
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…

As a longtime customer (I have my challenge coin right here), and fan of your writing, I do implore you to consider that your writing has value without AI. I would rather read an article with 1/5 the words that expresses your thoughts than something fluffed out.

Thanks Shank, feedback received, and appreciate that you have enjoyed my other writing in the past. Thanks for being a customer.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#89

Post by naikrovek »

pixl97 wrote: post #79
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…

>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? This question has been answered a million times, and thousands of times on HN alone. Because in a desktop operating system the vast majority of people using their computer want to open files, they do that so applications can share information. >Why is isolation betwe…

Are you suggesting that it's impossible to have a system that is secure by default and be usable by normal people? Because I'm saying that's very possible and I'm starting to get angry that it hasn't happened.

Plan 9 did this and that kernel is 50k lines of code. and I can bind any part of any attached filesystem I want into a location that any running application has access to, so if any program only has access to a single folder of its own by default, I can still access files from other applications, but I have to opt into that by making those files available via mounting them into the folder of the application I want to be able to access them.

I am not saying that Plan9 is usable by normal people, but I am saying that it's possible to have a system which is secure, usable, not a phone, and easy to develop on (as everything a developer needs can be set up easily by that developer.)

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#90

Post by nomagicbullet »

JasonADrury wrote: post #6

Why are these articles always AI written? What's the point of having AI generate a bunch of filler text?

This is a tough one in my opinion because the content of the article is valuable. Yes while reading it i noticed several AI tells. Almost like hearing a record scratch every other paragraph. But I was interested in the content so I kept reading mostly trying to ignore the "noise". The problem I fear is that with enough AI generated content around, I will become desensitized to that record scratching. Eventually between over-exposure, those who can't recognize the tells, people copying the writing they see..., we might have to accept what might become a prevalent new style of writing.
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