What the hell is a Moltbot and why should you care?
2–3–2026 (Tuesday)
Hello, and welcome to The Intentional Brief - your weekly video update on the one big thing in cybersecurity for middle market companies, their investors, and executive teams.
I’m your host, Shay Colson, Managing Partner at Intentional Cybersecurity, and you can find us online at intentionalcyber.com.
Today is Tuesday, February 3, 2026, and I’m going to ask you to take a bit of a walk down a strange path with me today.
What the hell is a Moltbot and why should you care?
If you don’t want strange, you can stick to the vanilla sort of items we talk about on this show and just go read the first article in the links below on how a Chinese state actor has been working to infiltrate the Notepad++ program, widely used by developers and other technical folks on their machines or the other article about real-time voice phishing kits making it easy to attack victims over the phone.
Now for the rabbit hole.
Certain corners of the internet have spent the last week watching, laughing, and feeling conflicted about the rise of AI agents working together on a social network for AI agents - similar to Reddit.
Yes, this is a real thing, and the “social network built exclusively for AI agents” is for a new tool that leverages AI to be your personal assistant by running on your local computer 24/7.
Called OpenClaw (or Clawdbot or Moltbot), this platform does have some interesting applications and implications, but it also presents a massive amount of security risk.
While we could get into the interesting bits around the agents self-organizing or noting the their humans are watching, I think the security implications are a bit more plain: the hardest part about AI is velocity.
These things move very quickly, and security can be very hard to add after the fact. Indeed, Wiz notes that security needs to “become a first-class, built-in part of AI powered development.”
They provide a ton of technical details on how these security weaknesses manifested, so if you’re building tools using Claude or Gemini or Codex (e.g. vibe coding), these are worth making sure you get right.
But for those of us on the enterprise side, we also need other make sure that the other controls we’re responsible for are put in place - like removing local admins, enforcing role-based access controls, using the concepts of least privilege, and providing our users ways to capture value from AI deployments in a way that is risk-informed.
Venture Beat had some good advice for security teams, including:
Audit your network for exposed agentic AI gateways. Run Shodan scans against your IP ranges for OpenClaw, Moltbot, and Clawdbot signatures. If your developers are experimenting, you want to know before attackers do.
Map where Willison's lethal trifecta exists in your environment. Identify systems combining private data access, untrusted content exposure, and external communication. Assume any agent with all three is vulnerable until proven otherwise.
Segment access aggressively. Your agent doesn't need access to all of Gmail, all of SharePoint, all of Slack, and all your databases simultaneously. Treat agents as privileged users. Log the agent's actions, not just the user's authentication.
Scan your agent skills for malicious behavior. Cisco released its Skill Scanner as open source. Use it. Some of the most damaging behavior hides inside the files themselves.
Update your incident response playbooks. Prompt injection doesn't look like a traditional attack. There's no malware signature, no network anomaly, no unauthorized access. The attack happens inside the model's reasoning. Your SOC needs to know what to look for.
Establish policy before you ban. You can't prohibit experimentation without becoming the productivity blocker your developers route around. Build guardrails that channel innovation rather than block it. Shadow AI is already in your environment. The question is whether you have visibility into it.
I don’t know what these AI bots are going to do this week, but I do know that we’ve entered a new era where things that felt far fetched and fanciful only a few months ago are now coming to life literally overnight.
Buckle up!
Fundraising
From a fundraising perspective, modest numbers with just shy of $7B in newly committed capital, but there was a piece in the FT that saw Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo call “some public software companies had become “unbuyable” due to their excessive stock compensation, which would prevent PE buyers from paying acceptable prices to strike takeovers given that the stock grants would have to be paid for in cash.”
How this will manifest in the market is anyone’s guess, but we’ve got some big mechanics that still need to work themselves out - before AI erodes their moat and drives down their enterprise value.
A reminder that you can find links to all the articles we covered below, find back issues of these videos and the written transcripts at intentionalcyber.com, and now sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Intentional Dispatch.
We’ll see you next week for another edition of the Intentional Brief.
Links
https://cyberscoop.com/shinyhunters-voice-phishing-sso-okta-mfa-bypass-data-theft/
https://www.wiz.io/blog/exposed-moltbook-database-reveals-millions-of-api-keys
https://x.com/theonejvo/status/2015401219746128322
https://venturebeat.com/security/openclaw-agentic-ai-security-risk-ciso-guide
https://www.ft.com/content/8c2a5c48-17bf-4baa-9bbf-ac6cbe9279ca