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Viral Moltbot AI assistant raises concerns over data security

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Security researchers are warning of insecure deployments in enterprise environments of the Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) AI assistant, which can lead to leaking API keys, OAuth tokens, conversation history, and credentials.

Moltbot is an open-source personal AI assistant with deep system integration created by Peter Steinberger that can be hosted locally on user devices and integrated directly with the user’s apps, including messengers and email clients, as well as the filesystem.

Unlike cloud-based chatbots, Moltbot can run 24/7 locally, maintaining a persistent memory, proactively reaching out to the user for alerts/reminders, executing scheduled tasks, and more.

This capability and ease of setup have made Moltbot viral quickly, even driving up sales of Mac Mini as people sought dedicated host machines for the chatbot.

Exposed admin interfaces

However, multiple security researchers caution that careless deployment of Moltbot can lead to sensitive data leaks, corporate data exposure, credential theft, and command execution, depending on the chatbot's permissions and access level on the host.

Some of the security implications were highlighted by pentester Jamieson O’Reilly. The researcher explains that hundreds of Clawdbot Control admin interfaces are exposed online due to reverse proxy misconfiguration.

Because Clawdbot auto-approves “local” connections, deployments behind reverse proxies often treat all internet traffic as trusted, so many exposed instances allow unauthenticated access, credential theft, access to conversation history, command execution, and root-level system access.

“Someone [...] had set up their own Signal (encrypted messenger) account on their public-facing clawdbot control server – with full read access,” the researcher says.

"That's a Signal device linking URI (there were QR codes also). Tap it on a phone with Signal installed and you're paired to the account with full access."

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