OpenClaw CVE-2026-41374

The audio preflight feature must be enabled in the OpenClaw deployment (enabled by default in most configurations). The attacker must have network access to the Discord bot's audio preflight endpoint, which is accessible if the bot is deployed with public-facing HTTP/WebSocket listeners. No Discord member authorization is required - this is the core vulnerability. No special configuration is needed; default configurations of OpenClaw versions before 2026.3.31 are vulnerable. The attack does not require interaction with legitimate Discord members or special Discord server permissions. Exploitation is limited only by network bandwidth and the number of concurrent requests the attacker can generate; there are no rate limits or authentication barriers in the vulnerable code path.

CVSS 6.9 with network vector (AV:N) and no privileges required (PR:N) indicates a moderately severe availability risk accessible to any remote attacker. The integrity and confidentiality impact are None (VI:N, VC:N), confirming this is purely a denial-of-service issue rather than data breach risk. However, the real-world risk depends critically on OpenClaw's deployment scale and resource constraints. If OpenClaw runs on shared infrastructure or has limited concurrent processing capacity, an attacker can easily exhaust resources by sending repeated audio preflight requests, degrading service for legitimate users. The AC:L (Low Complexity) rating indicates no special exploitation conditions beyond network access. The lack of authentication (PR:N, UI:N) makes exploitation trivial - any threat actor or script can trigger the vulnerability without credentials or user interaction. Since this is a Discord bot, the attack surface is the bot's HTTP/WebSocket endpoints that handle audio preflight. KEV status and EPSS scores are not provided, but the public GitHub advisory and patch suggest this was disclosed responsibly with vendor cooperation. The availability impact (VA:L) is understated if the attacker can saturate CPU/memory through repeated concurrent requests.

An attacker discovers OpenClaw is running on a target Discord server or identifies the bot's API endpoint. The attacker sends a series of HTTP requests to the audio preflight endpoint with crafted Discord audio data or identifiers, triggering resource-intensive transcription preprocessing without providing valid member authorization. Each request consumes CPU and memory (transcription engines are computationally expensive). With no rate limiting, the attacker sends hundreds of concurrent requests, exhausting server resources, causing the bot to slow down, become unresponsive, or crash entirely, preventing all Discord users on that server from using the bot's services.