Beware of OpenClaw, a new AI tool and potential threat

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When I began writing about the potential dangers and benefits of AI a few years ago, I quickly came to the conclusion that the two are very closely tied and both directions present new challenges for enterprise IT managers. The latest development of Clawdbot (AKA Molt.bot or now called OpenClaw) are a very instructive case study. So what does it do, and what is the threat?

Basically, it is a powerful way to automate your digital life using a variety of AI agents. It is an AI-based assistant, and its use is spreading like wildfire. The top line is that OpenClaw is taking over — Token Security has found it has collected more than 60,000 Github reviews and nearly a quarter of its enterprise customers are using it and running it mostly from their personal accounts. They say “It is also a security nightmare, with exposed control servers that can lead to credential theft and remote execution over the internet.” This is no Chicken Little deal — “This rapid adoption signals a significant shadow AI trend that security teams need to address immediately.”

Here are two places that provide a deeper dive: First is security blogger Samuel Gregory, who has an excellent 15 minute demo video where he says “If you don’t know what you are doing, you can cause a lot of damage.” He shows you some of the guardrails you need to install, explains a bit of the bot’s history, and is well worth watching. But many of his suggestions mean you have to do a lot more work to isolate the bot from your online life — which shows quite starkly the tradeoff of security with ease of use.

Shelly Palmer, who actually uses the tech he writes about has this post where he documents what it took to get it up and running across his digital life. The bot connects his Slack, iMessage, WeChat, and Discord accounts. He has spent several hundred dollars in tokens to fine-tune it, and says it costs him anywhere from $10-$25 a day — “the bot just eats tokens.”

Part of OpenClaw’s problem is that you can run it on your local hard drive, but that it sends its feelers deep into your corporate SaaS infrastructure. For this to work, the bot needs access to your accounts and credentials. The bot’s website (mentioned above) is proud of this connectivity, saying up front that it “Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.” A story in El Reg goes into further details about the security implications. Not surprisingly, as they mention, “Users are handing over the keys to their encrypted messenger apps, phone numbers, and bank accounts to this agentic system.” Gulp.

The bot has its own package registry where you can download various “skills” as they are called to do various tasks for you. This sounds great until you realize — as this one researcher describes (sorry it is a Tweet, forgive me), there is absolutely no vetting, and 100% chance that something you have downloaded has evil intent.  Daniel Miessler Tweeted this warning shown below on how to harden any Clawdbot implementation. But many of the fixes depend on personal choices deeply rooted in the realm of Shadow IT. The issue is that it is easy to install, but difficult to install securely, something that many users might not realize in their joy of having a clean inbox and automatically delegating their mundane tasks.

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SOCPrime used its own tool to find users who have jumped on the Clawdbot bandwagon, and I am sure other threat intel tools will soon have similar posts.

“Yes, there are real issues: plain-text secret storage, misconfigured admin UIs on the open internet, and a skills ecosystem where people blindly install untrusted code,” says Matt Johansen. So keep your eyes open, scan your networks for the appropriate indicators, and educate yourself and your end users on what they are doing and how they do it more securely.

When spreadsheets first entered businesses, I recall how hard IT had to work to stay ahead of our users who were enamored with the new tech. But that was a single piece of software. With OpenClaw, we have an entirely new layer of digital infrastructure, and one that is complex and could be costly as well as open up multiple security sinkholes. Proceed with caution.

Book review: Fidelity, an old book with a tale as old as time

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Fidelity

For a book that is more than 100 years old, it is surprisingly modern and relevant. The story is universal — a woman breaks up a marriage with an affair, and the subsequent couple is run out of a small town in Iowa. The reaction to the town might be old-fashioned, but the raw human emotions, and the inner conflict of the characters is thoroughly modern. The couple can’t get married because the ex-wife doesn’t want to divorce her husband. “Some people, could go on with the life love had made after the love has gone,” says Ruth, the character at the center of this novel, which explores what happens when someone gets stuck emotionally, and how things might have turned out differently if Ruth had just fallen in love with someone else “like other girls in her crowd.” I think my only quibble is that the title of the book might be better with “resentment” because a lot of the emotional content which is brilliantly written is about what one character feels towards others.

I read the Belt Publishing version which has a wonderful introduction that ties its narrative to contemporary times.

Book review: Rich Mironov’s Money Stories

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I have known Rich Mironov for more than two decades through numerous product management positions across the tech universe. His new book is “Money Stories: Communicating the Value of Product Work” and it is a great guidebook to what he calls members of the maker set and how they can talk to the other part of the company that doesn’t make anything but money (whom he collectively calls go-to-market execs), and hopefully profits to pay for all the fancy product stuff.

Money stories are good for providing the basis of why a company should build a product, creating a shared vocabulary that both makers and marketing execs can understand each other, and help rank development priorities and set strategies. And that is a good name for them, because making money is fundamental to a business (sometimes makers forget this), and decisions on knowing what to do something and when are often based on magical thinking, or emotions, or anything but money. These stories fall into six general patterns, such as upselling, boosting volume, reducing churn, acquiring new customers, entering a new market, or saving operational costs. For each pattern, he provides sample narratives, walks the reader through the underlying math, and calls out mistakes to avoid.

Mironov has seen it all, having been part of six Silicon Valley startups and consulted for hundreds of private clients. He now lives in Portugal, which I documented in that post. Money Stories is a fast read, but filled with lots of his wisdom. While the book is less than 90 pages, it is chock full of useful and actionable information. For example, “It’s much more productive to have a strategic portfolio-level argument about R&D resources and focus, rather than dragging executives through a 900-row spreadsheet.” And, “It is more important to agree on one simple calculation than throw punches,” presumably at the non-makers in the room.

One metric worth repeating is that “products need to earn six times their direct maker-team costs to fund the rest of the company.” That is the ultimate money story. “Either a product is earning its keep, or it is subject to summary execution.” Plain and simple. This is because the maker group has a heavy lift, and needs to support a constellation of services and specialities such as sales, marketing, finance, HR and so forth.

Much of his full-time experience has been with tech companies in the B2B space, where he is familiar with lengthy sales cycles, multiple people involved in purchase decisions, inability to quickly adapt pricing to market changes, or other sins. You would think this would harden a weaker person, but Mironov goes about his day with plenty of ironic humor (such as this post he wrote more than 20 years ago) and a can-do attitude that shows how he has survived and thrived in the product space.

Throughout the book are very handy “generic money story” diagrams that use simple math to calculate from three factors whether a new feature or product is going to worth the effort. It is important that this calculation is expressed as a range, to emphasize that we can’t accurately forecast the future (absent a working time machine, he hastens to add). “Money stories are communication tools, so should help drive a lot of conversations and raise interesting issues.” His last chapter reviews how to put these stories into practice, and some words on how AI fits into his worldview.

CSOonline: AI-powered polymorphic attack lures victims to phishing webpages

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AI-fueled attacks can transform an innocuous webpage into a customed phishing page. The attacks, revealed in research from Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42, are clever in how they combine various obfuscation techniques. The combination though can be lethal, difficult to discover, and represent yet another new offensive front in the use of AI by bad actors to compromise enterprise networks. You can read more in my story today for CSOonline.

I have too much security today

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This morning, I had three tasks to complete that involved using various web sites. First, I had found an old recall on a part to my Cuisinart food processor. The recall notice cited a web page that (I assume) was such an old reference that the page has since evaporated.  Then I was trying to review the latest charges on my credit card. And finally, I wanted to pay a doctor bill online. Each of these tasks would have taken minutes to accomplish. Instead, the elapsed total time was several hours.

Now, I am not one of those Gen Z’ers that would rather text (or use the web) than talk to an actual human being in real time. Nevertheless, that was going to be how I would solve the Cuisinart Challenge. While the URL for the recall wasn’t in service, they had provided a phone number in the recall notice.

So I called the number and I was told all lines would be busy for the next five minutes and if I wanted them to call me back, just press 1, which I did. A few minutes later I got  my calll back. Once the support person took down my info, it quickly processed and a new part was promised within a few weeks. Excellent service: I think I bought that appliance probably 17 years ago.

Next, on to checking my credit card. I called the bank, they started to walk me through the process, and then we both realized that I was using a “secure” browser (Opera Air) that I remembered had some odd quirks, particularly because it blocks ads and popups. Sure enough, once I brought up Chrome, I was off to the races and able to login without any problems.

That made me think my doctor’s bill was suffering from the same condition, so I tried that in Chrome and hot diggity, problem solved and I could pay my bill just in time for lunch. So much for my morning.

Now, you might ask why am I using Opera Air? I got tired of all the popups and effluvia that I was experiencing with Chrome, and also annoying with the Googleplex in general. (Yes, I know, Opera is based on the Chrome code base, but that is just the way the modern browser worlds operate these days — with the exception of Safari and Firefox. Even Microsoft uses Chrome for Edge nowadays.)

Is there such a thing as using too much security? No. But there is a constant trade-off among security, privacy, and usability. It is a three-way tug-of-war. And the more you tug on one of the three legs, the more the other two will give way.

CSOonline: Secure web browsers for the enterprise compared: How to pick the right one

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The web browser has long been the security sinkhole of enterprise infrastructure. While email is often cited as the most common entry point, malware often enters via the browser and is more difficult to prevent. Phishing, drive-by attacks, ransomware, SQL injections, man-in-the-middle (MitM), and other exploits all take advantage of the browser’s creaky user interface and huge attack surface, and the gullibility of most end users.

This is why enterprise secure browsers have finally gotten their moment. The category, which has been mostly flying under the radar for the past six years, has seen a lot of changes since I last wrote about them three years ago. Google announced its own entry into the field last year. Talon and Perception Point — who were in that post — were acquired by Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet respectively, showing how this technology has become part of a larger security context. To that end, other established security vendors have brought forth products in what Gartner is now calling the “remote browser isolation” market to complement their zero trust, secure services edge, or posture management security platforms.

I have updated my post for CSO this week and provide more recent information on how to evaluate this class of products, what are typical protective features, and describe the more than a dozen products and what they offer.

Coming f2f with a nuclear missile

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ImageLast week I happened to be on a vacation in Tucson and stopped by a rather unique museum. Those of you who are long-time readers will recognize this as a feature, not a bug (see my work on the St. Louis Aquarium,  NSA’s museum, UX museum design, and the Lincoln presidential library). I went to the site of the last Titan Missile silo.

Titans were first created to launch a massive retaliatory strike back in the 1960s. Each missile contained a single 9 megaton warhead, perhaps the biggest bomb ever deployed. (By way of comparison, the original blast over Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.) They were designed to be launched within a minute or so after receiving the go-code. Three locations were picked, each field containing 17 silos that were essentially self-contained underground environments consisting of a dormitory, a control center and the silo itself. In the mid-1980s, all of the other silos were completely decommissioned and made inoperable.

The museum contains the last remaining silo that has a missile in it (minus propulsion and the warhead of course). If you take the tour you spend about an hour underground seeing it up close as well as witnessing a simulated launch sequence with some of the original control gear.

Now, I thought I knew a lot about nuclear missiles, but I found the experience both fascinating and chilling, especially as we seem to be talking about them more often these days. One fact that I learned is that the Titan collection would be launched entirely when the order was given: that meant that all 54 of them would be airborne at once. Whether life on Earth could survive that combined blast isn’t clear, it reminded me of the “Doomsday Machine” that was popularized in the 1960s — of course, that machine was automated. To launch each missile required two human operations to go through a sequence of authentication steps (double-keyed locks, one-time passcodes and the like) to verify things. The movies represent this sequence in spirit. In reality – at least in our simulation – is very involved with multiple steps, which makes sense.

ImageOne of the reasons the Titan was decommissioned was the era of a single big bomb per missile evolved into having one rocket with multiple smaller warheads, which is what the vast majority of the world’s some 12,000 weapons look like today. Another point in Titan’s disfavor is that it doesn’t make sense to have much in the way of land-based weaponry, since they are essentially sitting ducks for the enemy to target. Most of today’s weaponry is mobile, based in subs or on planes, such as the UK or France.

But whether you count by warheads or rockets requires a lot more nuance. China, for example, has a huge stockpile, but fewer weapons that are ready to launch. And I would argue that another aspect that doesn’t get much discussion is the world’s 400-plus nuclear power plants that are scattered around 30-some countries. While these plants are doing something useful – producing electricity – they are also sitting ducks for enemy targets. Russia has specialized in this arena, sadly. About a year ago, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was targeted by Russian drones that punched a hole in its protective roof. Some have said it was an accident, and Russia denies they fired anything, both not very credible statements.

As you might remember, the damaged reactor was encased in a huge building with several layers of steel and concrete, designed to keep the escaping radiation inside and away from humans. To my way of thinking, this was the second time a nuclear strike was used in warfare. The first was an earlier Russian missile fired at Ukraine’s nuclear power station. Why no one is making a bigger deal out of these events is curious.

After my friend and I did the Titan tour, we decided to watch Dr. Strangelove to see how accurate their depiction of nuclear warfare was. While the exact details differed, the movie has held up well over the years, and I would recommend you screen it too.

LinkedIn Live: Inside the threat hunt, turning signals into evidence

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ImageI recently moderated a live event (which has been recorded and can be accessed here, with registration), about how to do threat hunting using Corelight’s Investigator tool. My partner is Mark Overholser, who is their technical marketing engineer. Mark is an accomplished threat hunter and veteran of numerous Black Hat SOC tours of duty, so he has seen a lot of wonky circumstances go across his screens.

We talk about why being proactive is important in learning how to hone your investigations, how to use the MITRE ATT&CK foundation (shown above) and schema to hone your focus and guide your efforts.  (I wrote about the evolution of ATT&CK for CSO back in 2021 here), We also discuss how to drill down to suss out what is going on across your network. .

Corelight also has an excellent threat hunting guide that is keyed to the ATT&CK categories, with loads of suggestions to how you can leverage it to help in your hunts.

When is the cell phone age of consent?

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I realize that I am not using the term precisely, but you most likely understand the meaning. You could interpret my question as asking, at what age as parents do we provide cell phones for our kids? I asked my readers to share their own experiences, and most opted to remain anonymous, so I will refer to them with descriptors to distinguish them. In addition to the age of consent, I also asked other details about their kids’ usage and what controls they used to formulate their family phone policies.

The Fortunate family has two boys that are now in college. They got their phones when they were 12. “We trusted our kids and never had a problem,” at least to their knowledge. They initially used a Verizon blocking and monitoring phone app. They never had access to their kids’ phones and “on the whole it wasn’t a problem.” That is why I call them “fortunate.”

The Strict family also has two teen-aged boys (19 and 12), both of whom sort of got their phones when they were 12. The older boy “has only an Instagram account now but rarely uses it (mostly just to see occasional friend’s posts). He has the right priorities and values, and we don’t need to stay on top of this for him at all—he limits himself.” The younger boy is why I say “sort of” because his device is a locked-down iPad, which also comes with usage limits (“we collect it at night, and he’s not allowed to get it until all homework and other responsibilities are completed”). What is more significant is that “he has learned to bypass the controls on his school Chromebook and knows where to find unblocked games — that’s a big enough headache for me frankly.” Oh, and the parents are keepers of the passwords too.

The OnRamp family has a boy and a girl that got their phones between 16 and 18 (and are now in college). “I would caution any parent who would allow a phone prior to age 16,” they said. “Our kids needed an on ramp, you can’t just lock them down and then cut them free in an instant.” This family saw the need for phones at discrete moments, such as when traveling. But having an on ramp also meant restricting social apps or with a lot of oversight or forbidding them in places such as their bedrooms, when the phones would be relegated to a charging shelf. They also recognize that they didn’t do as good a job at teaching them other worries such as doom scrolling or going down rabbit holes, because “any content consumption can be addictive.”

When my cousins had teen girls, they got their first phones both at age 12 (they are now 19 and 21). They had access to their AppleIDs and PIN codes so they could monitor which apps they had, and also banned phones at their dining table and collected them at night.

One reader has four daughters from 4 to 10 years old, call them the Home School family. He said, “I can’t imagine ever giving them cell phones, and believe strongly in parent/child attachment.”

Several readers were pretty vocal about not allowing cell phones in the classroom. Of course, that places the responsibility on each teacher to detect usage, which can be an issue. But then this is just another part of their responsibilities.Many years ago, I taught a high school networking class for 10 boys. The class was done in a hard-wired network lab (wifi hadn’t yet become popular or available in the school). When a student was giving me problems, I would unplug their computer. That public shaming seemed to work for me — and the related peer pressure for them as well.

Others suggested buying phones without any internet data plans or GPS-enabled watches, such as from Mint Mobile, Gabb.com, Bark.us or Tello.com. These vendors have a wide range of products and Gabb has an impressive amount of content that can help you pick out the right piece of tech for your kids.

However, like any blocking or protective tech, these solutions may create additional problems. The Contract family used the Bark.us app and did help out in one situation, but he grew tired of its frequent and buggy updates, and discontinued its use last year. They also made their kids sign a multi-page cellphone agreement, which he has agreed I can share with you here. This might work for you, but I think many of you would find this level of pseudo-legality a bit much. Another source worth exploring is Delaney Ruston’s blog (she has interviewed many families for her documentary films about family tech use), and this post goes into great detail about how to formulate your family’s phone policies.

Another reader, we’ll call him Childless Man, says that “if I had had a cell phone when I was 12 to 15, I would have gotten myself in lots of trouble. I can’t be the only kid who’s libido was running overdrive!”

Finally, there is the Watch family, with two daughters 8 and 11. So named, because they have focused on getting watches rather than phones, at least initially. “The Apple watch is great, because when it is not paired to a phone it cannot access any apps.” They also manually add contacts to the watch so they can control who their girls communicate with, and are the keepers of the passwords too. “The watch is restricted to contact with mom&dad only after 8:30pm and is also on “school mode” during the day. Our kids’ schools are also complete black holes of cell service.”

I originally thought about this topic in terms of kid’s social network usage, but as I was corresponding with you all I see that I haven’t really understood the breadth and depth of the issue. Yes, we can try to block TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. But what about YouTube, Discord, and playing online games? And kids are clever at getting around app blockers, as I mentioned with the Strict family earlier. I probably will have more to say about this topic and welcome your input as always.

So what can you glean from these examples? There is no perfect solution, and the important thing is to match your level of expertise (many of the families cited here are from parents who are computing professionals) and also the kind of kids you have and how they develop and what tech their peers are using. (To that end Ruston pointed me to the Waituntil8th.org, which promotes parents to act together to wait until eight grade before giving their kids phones.) That shows that your policies and restrictions will of course change as your kids grow up. Thanks to all of you who answered my query, and if you want to share your own experiences, feel free to comment here or send me a private message.

CSOonline: CASB buyer’s guide

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Since I began examining cloud access security brokers in 2018, a lot has happened. CASBs sit between an organization’s endpoints and cloud resources, acting as a gateway that monitors everything that goes in or out, providing visibility into what users are doing in the cloud, enforcing access control policies, and looking out for security threats.

Some vendors have begun incorporating additional features into core CASB functionality, such as data loss prevention (DLP), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud security posture management (CSPM), and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). Other CASB vendors have been purchased by main-line security vendors have purchased CASB solutions: Oracle (Palerra), IBM (Gravitant), Microsoft (Adallom), Forcepoint (Skyfence), Proofpoint (FireLayers), Symantec (Skycure) and McAfee (Skyhigh Networks). The market has matured, although this is a matter of degree since even the longest-running vendors have only been selling products for a few years. It has also evolved to the point where many analysts feel CASB will be just as important in the near future just as firewalls once were back in the day when PCs were being bought by the truckloads.

There are three deployment modes: forward proxy, reverse proxy and API-based. Most experts say that API-based CASBs provide better functionality, but organizations need to make sure that the vendor’s list of application programming interface (API) connections matches up with the organization’s inventory of cloud apps.

In this updated story for CSOonline, I talk about what are these products, why enterprises are motivated to purchase and deploy them,  what features you should look for that are appropriate for your network. what are your decision points in the purchase process, and links to many of the major CASB vendors.