TLDR Tech / Dev
The Cline CLI got compromised. Here is how
On February 17, an attacker published a malicious cline@2.3.0 to npm using a stolen publish token, injecting a postinstall hook that silently installed OpenClaw (a background AI daemon with full disk/terminal access) on ~4,000 machines over 8 hours. The theft was pulled off via a chain of prompt injection through Cline's AI issue triage bot. The fix had already been published by a researcher 8 days earlier, but Cline revoked the wrong token, leaving the npm publish token alive for a second actor to exploit.
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