220,000+ OpenClaw Instances Are Exposed. Here's How to Check Yours.

Security researchers have been scanning for exposed OpenClaw instances since January 2026. The numbers vary by methodology: Penligent found over 220,000, SecurityScorecard identified 135,000, Censys tracked growth from 1,000 to 21,000+ in a single week. Microsoft's security blog concluded that "for most environments, the appropriate decision may be not to deploy it." Most of these instances are running without TLS. Many are still vulnerable to ClawJacked (CVE-2026-25253, CVSS 8.8), which allowed any webpage you visited to silently brute-force the gateway token over localhost with no rate limiting. I've been reviewing public configs and deployment guides. Three misconfigs show up in the majority of them, and they're all fixable in minutes. The exposure surface OpenClaw's default config binds the gateway to 0.0.0.0:18789. If you install it on a VPS and don't touch the network settings, the gateway is public. There's no warning during setup. The docs mention it, but not where people look.