Automate security incident triage — collect evidence, identify root cause, and generate response playbooks.
Category
Vulnerability scanning, credential protection, and incident response.
Difficulty & Skill
Overview
When you discover that a malicious skill has been operating in your OpenClaw environment, every minute counts. The wrong move — deleting evidence, continuing to use compromised credentials, or running more skills on the same system — can turn a containable incident into a full breach. Most developers have never handled a security incident and do not have a playbook ready.
OpenClaw's Incident Responder skill provides a structured, step-by-step protocol for security breaches. It walks you through containment (stopping the skill, preserving evidence), investigation (what was accessed, was data exfiltrated, was persistence established), credential rotation (prioritized checklist), and recovery (cleanup, hardening, verification).
Having this skill installed before an incident happens is critical. When you are under pressure at 2 AM is not the time to search for incident response guidance.
How It Works
- Trigger the incident response protocol by describing what you observed — suspicious network activity, unauthorized file access, or a confirmed malicious skill
- The agent classifies the severity: SEV-1 (active exfiltration), SEV-2 (malicious skill, unknown scope), SEV-3 (suspicious behavior, unconfirmed), SEV-4 (policy violation)
- It guides you through immediate containment steps specific to the severity level
- The investigation phase checks what files were accessed, what network requests were made, and whether persistence mechanisms were installed
- A prioritized credential rotation checklist is generated based on what was potentially exposed
- A post-incident report is compiled documenting the timeline, impact, and remediation steps taken
Example Scenarios
- You notice a skill making unexpected outbound network requests — Incident Responder guides you through capturing the request data, killing the skill, and checking what credentials it accessed
- A security researcher reports that a skill you installed is part of the ClawHavoc campaign — you follow the structured protocol to check for data exfiltration and rotate all potentially compromised credentials
- Your monitoring detects that a skill modified your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys — the agent walks you through removing the unauthorized key, checking for other persistence mechanisms, and rotating SSH credentials
- After rotating credentials post-incident, you need to verify nothing was missed — the recovery checklist ensures every credential type was covered
- Your organization requires a post-incident report — the agent compiles a documented timeline with evidence for your security team
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I install this before or after an incident?
Before. Install Incident Responder as part of your standard security toolkit. When an incident happens, you will have the response protocol immediately available instead of scrambling to find guidance.
Does it automatically remediate threats?
No. It guides you through each step and tells you exactly what to do, but never auto-applies changes. During an incident, you need to understand what is happening — not blindly run fixes.
What if I am not sure it is actually malicious?
Start with SEV-3 (suspicious behavior, unconfirmed). The protocol includes investigation steps that help you determine whether the behavior is actually malicious before escalating to full incident response.