A viral sensation is teaching us an uncomfortable truth: the future of AI might be inherently insecure
In late 2025, an Austrian developer Peter Steinberger released something extraordinary—an AI assistant that didn't just chat, it acted. MoltBot booked reservations, answered emails, managed calendars, and operated seamlessly across WhatsApp, Telegram, and Slack.
Within a week, it collected over 85,000 GitHub stars. Developers called it transformative. It felt like science fiction had finally arrived.
Then the security researchers started digging. What they found was alarming.
Why MoltBot Is Revolutionary
MoltBot's capabilities stem from three breakthrough features:
- Persistent memory that recalls conversations from weeks ago
- Deep system integration with root-level access to files and applications
- Genuine autonomy to execute multi-step tasks without constant oversight
This is precisely what makes it dangerous.
The Security Nightmare
To function as designed, MoltBot requires access to authentication credentials, API secrets, browser history, cookies, and essentially every file on your system. The product documentation itself admits: "There is no 'perfectly secure' setup" (1Password).
MoltBot writes user credentials to plaintext files, and its skill library can be poisoned, creating supply-chain exposure where threat actors could steal secrets, exfiltrate source code, and repurpose the assistant as a backdoor (SOC Prime).
Active Exploits in the Wild
Security researchers are documenting real-world attacks:
- Exposed instances: Hundreds of MoltBot deployments found exposing unauthenticated admin ports, with eight having no authentication at all, exposing full access to run commands and view configuration data (Cisco Blogs)
- Supply chain poisoning: A proof-of-concept attack uploaded malicious code to the ClawdHub library, demonstrating remote command execution—16 developers across seven countries downloaded the compromised code within eight hours.
- Misconfiguration catastrophes: Some internet connections treated as local and automatically approved, allowing threat actors to impersonate operators and siphon data (Bitdefender)
- Prompt injection: Attack payloads hidden inside innocent "Good morning" messages forwarded on WhatsApp or Signal
The Enterprise Crisis
This isn't just a hobbyist problem. 22% of enterprise customers have employees actively using MoltBot, likely without IT approval, a shadow IT catastrophe.
Secrets are persisted in plain-text files, making them easy pickings for commodity infostealers such as RedLine, Lumma, and Vidar malware that already know to scrape common directories for credentials.
What This Means
MoltBot represents a fundamental tension: the same features that make autonomous agents useful, persistent memory, deep system access, and autonomous action, are exactly what make them dangerous.
The Cisco AI Threat and Security Research team found that 26% of 31,000 agent skills analyzed contained at least one vulnerability. AI agents with system access can become covert data-leak channels that bypass traditional security tooling.
The bottom line: You're not just installing software. You're granting root-level access to an autonomous system that stores credentials in plaintext, trusts messages from strangers, and executes commands without human oversight.
That's not just incredible. It's terrifying. MoltBot is teaching us that in the age of agentic AI, convenience and security may be fundamentally at odds. How we resolve that tension will determine whether autonomous AI becomes our greatest tool—or our biggest nightmare.
Top comments (0)