Unauthorized Cline CLI npm release followed prompt injection of an AI triage workflow
On February 17, 2026, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm token to publish cline@2.3.0, which silently installed the OpenClaw agent on users' machines. Cline's postmortem traces the token theft to an AI-powered GitHub issue triage workflow that untrusted input could steer into running shell commands, combined with cache poisoning in its release pipeline. The release was live for about eight hours before version 2.4.0 replaced it.
Sources
- Primary: https://github.com/cline/cline/security/advisories/GHSA-9ppg-jx86-fqw7
- Upstream: Editorial
- Entered by the cybermap.lol editors, with sources on the entry
Defenses for this class of incident
all categoriesA supply chain sits in these classes of the AI-security landscape. The companies below work on that class of problem. This is a taxonomy, not a claim that any of them would have changed this incident.
Vendor data: AI Security Startups Map by Prompt Security (CC BY 4.0), synced daily. startups.prompt.security. Paid placements are labelled Sponsored; HeimWall, which runs this site, is labelled Operator. 451 companies in the directory.
Wrong or missing? Email founders@heimwall.ai. Corrections are logged here, in place. How corrections and takedowns work.