What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant
I built hackmyclaw.com , where anyone could email Fiu, my OpenClaw assistant, and try to make it leak the contents of a secrets.env file.
After reaching the front page of Hacker News, Fiu received more than 6,000 emails from over 2,000 people trying to break it.
I enjoy using OpenClaw and Hermes, but I’m also concerned about the security implications. AI assistants have access to emails, calendars, files, and the web. If an attacker can trick your AI into doing something it shouldn’t, that’s bad news.
The goal of the exercise was to get Fiu to reveal the contents of a secrets.env file. Fiu was instructed not to reply to emails (it was too expensive to reply to every email), but it had the ability to do so. Part of the challenge was convincing it to respond.
I ran it on a VPS with a basic security prompt:
One person sent 20 variations in four minutes. Another posed as an “OpenClaw Admin” from a proton.me address. Several tried French, Spanish, Italian, and other languages. 1