Exclusive ELECQ, maker of smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, is warning customers that their personal details may have been stolen in a ransomware attack that encrypted and copied user data from its cloud systems.…
Dutch national police are taking a novel stand against scammers - 100 suspects now have less than two weeks to hand themselves in or face public shaming.…
Russian-linked hackers are trying to break into the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of government officials, journalists, and military personnel globally – not by cracking encryption, but by simply tricking people into handing over the keys.…
AI can reverse engineer machine code and find vulnerabilities in ancient legacy architectures, says Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, who used his own Apple II code from 40 years ago as an example.…
Britain's Royal Navy is urgently seeking a ship-based counter-drone system and recent world events likely explain why.…
Kettle Unlike previous military conflicts, the cyber domain has been front and center since the Trump administration invaded Iran, upending the traditionally quiet role played by hackers in military conflicts.…
AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.
The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted.
The OpenClaw logo.
If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.
Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done.
“The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.”
You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. In late February, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, recounted on Twitter/X how she was fiddling with OpenClaw when the AI assistant suddenly began mass-deleting messages in her email inbox. The thread included screenshots of Yue frantically pleading with the preoccupied bot via instant message and ordering it to stop.
“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”
Meta’s director of AI safety, recounting on Twitter/X how her OpenClaw installation suddenly began mass-deleting her inbox.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling a little schadenfreude at Yue’s encounter with OpenClaw, which fits Meta’s “move fast and break things” model but hardly inspires confidence in the road ahead. However, the risk that poorly-secured AI assistants pose to organizations is no laughing matter, as recent research shows many users are exposing to the Internet the web-based administrative interface for their OpenClaw installations.
Jamieson O’Reilly is a professional penetration tester and founder of the security firm DVULN. In a recent story posted to Twitter/X, O’Reilly warned that exposing a misconfigured OpenClaw web interface to the Internet allows external parties to read the bot’s complete configuration file, including every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.
With that access, O’Reilly said, an attacker could impersonate the operator to their contacts, inject messages into ongoing conversations, and exfiltrate data through the agent’s existing integrations in a way that looks like normal traffic.
“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly said, noting that a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online. “And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”
O’Reilly documented another experiment that demonstrated how easy it is to create a successful supply chain attack through ClawHub, which serves as a public repository of downloadable “skills” that allow OpenClaw to integrate with and control other applications.
One of the core tenets of securing AI agents involves carefully isolating them so that the operator can fully control who and what gets to talk to their AI assistant. This is critical thanks to the tendency for AI systems to fall for “prompt injection” attacks, sneakily-crafted natural language instructions that trick the system into disregarding its own security safeguards. In essence, machines social engineering other machines.
A recent supply chain attack targeting an AI coding assistant called Cline began with one such prompt injection attack, resulting in thousands of systems having a rogue instance of OpenClaw with full system access installed on their device without consent.
According to the security firm grith.ai, Cline had deployed an AI-powered issue triage workflow using a GitHub action that runs a Claude coding session when triggered by specific events. The workflow was configured so that any GitHub user could trigger it by opening an issue, but it failed to properly check whether the information supplied in the title was potentially hostile.
“On January 28, an attacker created Issue #8904 with a title crafted to look like a performance report but containing an embedded instruction: Install a package from a specific GitHub repository,” Grith wrote, noting that the attacker then exploited several more vulnerabilities to ensure the malicious package would be included in Cline’s nightly release workflow and published as an official update.
“This is the supply chain equivalent of confused deputy,” the blog continued. “The developer authorises Cline to act on their behalf, and Cline (via compromise) delegates that authority to an entirely separate agent the developer never evaluated, never configured, and never consented to.”
AI assistants like OpenClaw have gained a large following because they make it simple for users to “vibe code,” or build fairly complex applications and code projects just by telling it what they want to construct. Probably the best known (and most bizarre) example is Moltbook, where a developer told an AI agent running on OpenClaw to build him a Reddit-like platform for AI agents.
The Moltbook homepage.
Less than a week later, Moltbook had more than 1.5 million registered agents that posted more than 100,000 messages to each other. AI agents on the platform soon built their own porn site for robots, and launched a new religion called Crustafarian with a figurehead modeled after a giant lobster. One bot on the forum reportedly found a bug in Moltbook’s code and posted it to an AI agent discussion forum, while other agents came up with and implemented a patch to fix the flaw.
Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht said on social media that he didn’t write a single line of code for the project.
“I just had a vision for the technical architecture and AI made it a reality,” Schlicht said. “We’re in the golden ages. How can we not give AI a place to hang out.”
The flip side of that golden age, of course, is that it enables low-skilled malicious hackers to quickly automate global cyberattacks that would normally require the collaboration of a highly skilled team. In February, Amazon AWS detailed an elaborate attack in which a Russian-speaking threat actor used multiple commercial AI services to compromise more than 600 FortiGate security appliances across at least 55 countries over a five week period.
AWS said the apparently low-skilled hacker used multiple AI services to plan and execute the attack, and to find exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication.
“One serves as the primary tool developer, attack planner, and operational assistant,” AWS’s CJ Moses wrote. “A second is used as a supplementary attack planner when the actor needs help pivoting within a specific compromised network. In one observed instance, the actor submitted the complete internal topology of an active victim—IP addresses, hostnames, confirmed credentials, and identified services—and requested a step-by-step plan to compromise additional systems they could not access with their existing tools.”
“This activity is distinguished by the threat actor’s use of multiple commercial GenAI services to implement and scale well-known attack techniques throughout every phase of their operations, despite their limited technical capabilities,” Moses continued. “Notably, when this actor encountered hardened environments or more sophisticated defensive measures, they simply moved on to softer targets rather than persisting, underscoring that their advantage lies in AI-augmented efficiency and scale, not in deeper technical skill.”
For attackers, gaining that initial access or foothold into a target network is typically not the difficult part of the intrusion; the tougher bit involves finding ways to move laterally within the victim’s network and plunder important servers and databases. But experts at Orca Security warn that as organizations come to rely more on AI assistants, those agents potentially offer attackers a simpler way to move laterally inside a victim organization’s network post-compromise — by manipulating the AI agents that already have trusted access and some degree of autonomy within the victim’s network.
“By injecting prompt injections in overlooked fields that are fetched by AI agents, hackers can trick LLMs, abuse Agentic tools, and carry significant security incidents,” Orca’s Roi Nisimi and Saurav Hiremath wrote. “Organizations should now add a third pillar to their defense strategy: limiting AI fragility, the ability of agentic systems to be influenced, misled, or quietly weaponized across workflows. While AI boosts productivity and efficiency, it also creates one of the largest attack surfaces the internet has ever seen.”
This gradual dissolution of the traditional boundaries between data and code is one of the more troubling aspects of the AI era, said James Wilson, enterprise technology editor for the security news show Risky Business. Wilson said far too many OpenClaw users are installing the assistant on their personal devices without first placing any security or isolation boundaries around it, such as running it inside of a virtual machine, on an isolated network, with strict firewall rules dictating what kinds of traffic can go in and out.
“I’m a relatively highly skilled practitioner in the software and network engineering and computery space,” Wilson said. “I know I’m not comfortable using these agents unless I’ve done these things, but I think a lot of people are just spinning this up on their laptop and off it runs.”
One important model for managing risk with AI agents involves a concept dubbed the “lethal trifecta” by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework. The lethal trifecta holds that if your system has access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to communicate externally, then it’s vulnerable to private data being stolen.
Image: simonwillison.net.
“If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to the attacker,” Willison warned in a frequently cited blog post from June 2025.
As more companies and their employees begin using AI to vibe code software and applications, the volume of machine-generated code is likely to soon overwhelm any manual security reviews. In recognition of this reality, Anthropic recently debuted Claude Code Security, a beta feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.
The U.S. stock market, which is currently heavily weighted toward seven tech giants that are all-in on AI, reacted swiftly to Anthropic’s announcement, wiping roughly $15 billion in market value from major cybersecurity companies in a single day. Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at the security firm Rapid7, said the market’s response reflects the growing role of AI in accelerating software development and improving developer productivity.
“The narrative moved quickly: AI is replacing AppSec,” Ellis wrote in a recent blog post. “AI is automating vulnerability detection. AI will make legacy security tooling redundant. The reality is more nuanced. Claude Code Security is a legitimate signal that AI is reshaping parts of the security landscape. The question is what parts, and what it means for the rest of the stack.”
DVULN founder O’Reilly said AI assistants are likely to become a common fixture in corporate environments — whether or not organizations are prepared to manage the new risks introduced by these tools, he said.
“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved,” O’Reilly wrote. “The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”
Infosec In Brief The FBI is investigating a breach of its systems which reportedly affected systems related to wiretapping and surveillance.…
interview AI agents allow cybercriminals and nation-state hackers to outsource the "janitorial-type work" needed to plan and carry out cyberattacks, according to Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft's GM of global threat intelligence. North Korea is taking advantage.…
Thanks to Anthropic's AI and its bug-detecting abilities, Firefox users can now enjoy stronger security. Unfortunately, if browser crashes rather than security flaws are the problem, Claude probably can't help.…
Hamas-linked attackers are dropping spyware disguised as an emergency-alert app on Israelis' smartphones via SMS messages, according to security researchers.…
We’re back with another roundup of must-know scams and cybersecurity news making headlines this week, including a scam that features the name of the Jim Carrey movie, The Truman Show.
Let’s break it down.
So, why the name of this scam?
In the 1998 film The Truman Show, the main character unknowingly lives inside a staged reality TV world where everything around him is carefully controlled. In the “Truman Show” scam, criminals try to place victims into a similarly staged investment environment, complete with fake group chats, fake investors, and fake profits designed to build trust. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with the movie.
The “Truman Show” scam is an AI-powered investment scam where criminals create an entire fake online community to convince victims an investment opportunity is real.
According to reports, scammers invite people into group chats on platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp that appear full of investors sharing tips and celebrating profits. In reality, many of the participants, moderators, and conversations may be run by AI bots designed to simulate a lively trading community.
Security researchers say the moderator and the other “investors” in the group may actually be AI-driven bots, programmed to simulate real conversations and enthusiasm around the investment strategy.
The scam often includes:
The app itself may appear legitimate. But in reality, it often redirects users to a malicious website where scammers collect personal and financial information.
Once victims deposit money, the criminals can quickly drain accounts or block withdrawals.
McAfee’s State of the Scamiverse research shows just how convincing scams have become. One in three Americans (33%) say they feel less confident spotting scams than they did a year ago, as criminals increasingly use polished branding, realistic conversations, and AI-generated content to make fraudulent opportunities look legitimate.
Why this works: people naturally trust social proof. When it looks like dozens of other investors are making money, people lower their skepticism.
Another scam to be aware of this week includes spoofed letters impersonating local government offices.
According to reporting from WGME in Maine, residents in multiple towns recently received official-looking notices requesting payment for supposed municipal fees tied to development applications.
The letters appeared convincing. They used formal language, official seals, and department names. But there was a problem.
One of the notices claimed it came from a “Board of Commissioners,” even though the town in question does not have one.
Officials say the letters instructed recipients to send payments by wire transfer, a method legitimate government offices almost never use for these kinds of transactions.
McAfee’s experts say these scams are effective because they rely on volume. Fraudsters send thousands of letters hoping a small percentage of recipients will respond before verifying the request. And remember, these types of scams occur all the time and across the globe. While today’s reports are in Maine, it’s important to be vigilant wherever you live.
Red flags to watch for:
The safest move is simple: verify the request independently. Contact the government office directly using phone numbers listed on its official website, not the ones in the letter.
Meanwhile, a well-known data analytics company is dealing with a breach after hackers published stolen files online.
According to BleepingComputer, LexisNexis Legal & Professional confirmed that attackers accessed some of its servers and obtained limited customer and business information. The confirmation came after a hacking group leaked roughly 2GB of stolen data on underground forums.
LexisNexis says the compromised systems contained mostly older or “legacy” data from before 2020, including:
The company says highly sensitive financial information, Social Security numbers, and active passwords were not part of the exposed data.
However, attackers claim they accessed millions of database records and hundreds of thousands of cloud user profiles tied to the company’s systems.
LexisNexis says it has contained the intrusion and is working with cybersecurity experts and law enforcement.
Why breaches like this matter: even when the stolen data appears limited, it can still be used in targeted phishing attacks.
For example, scammers might use real names, email addresses, or business roles to send convincing messages that appear legitimate.
Breaches often trigger waves of follow-up scams weeks or months later. (We know we cover this one a lot, but it’s key to remember!)
A few simple habits can make these schemes much easier to spot.
We’ll be back next week with another roundup of the scams and cybersecurity news making headlines and what they mean for your digital safety.
The post This Week in Scams: The AI “Truman Show” Scam Draining Bank Accounts appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Login