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Security researchers just lately revealed that the private data of tens of millions of people that utilized for jobs at McDonald’s was uncovered after they guessed the password (“123456”) for the quick meals chain’s account at Paradox.ai, an organization that makes synthetic intelligence based mostly hiring chatbots utilized by many Fortune 500 corporations. Paradox.ai mentioned the safety oversight was an remoted incident that didn’t have an effect on its different prospects, however current safety breaches involving its staff in Vietnam inform a extra nuanced story.
A screenshot of the paradox.ai homepage exhibiting its AI hiring chatbot “Olivia” interacting with potential hires.
Earlier this month, safety researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry wrote about easy strategies they discovered to entry the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McHire.com, the McDonald’s web site that lots of its franchisees use to display screen job candidates. As first reported by Wired, the researchers found that the weak password utilized by Paradox uncovered 64 million data, together with candidates’ names, e mail addresses and telephone numbers.
Paradox.ai acknowledged the researchers’ findings however mentioned the corporate’s different shopper situations weren’t affected, and that no delicate data — reminiscent of Social Security numbers — was uncovered.
“We are confident, based on our records, this test account was not accessed by any third party other than the security researchers,” the corporate wrote in a July 9 weblog put up. “It had not been logged into since 2019 and frankly, should have been decommissioned. We want to be very clear that while the researchers may have briefly had access to the system containing all chat interactions (NOT job applications), they only viewed and downloaded five chats in total that had candidate information within. Again, at no point was any data leaked online or made public.”
However, a evaluation of stolen password knowledge gathered by a number of breach-tracking companies exhibits that on the finish of June 2025, a Paradox.ai administrator in Vietnam suffered a malware compromise on their gadget that stole usernames and passwords for a wide range of inner and third-party on-line companies. The outcomes weren’t fairly.
The password knowledge from the Paradox.ai developer was stolen by a malware pressure referred to as “Nexus Stealer,” a kind grabber and password stealer that’s offered on cybercrime boards. The data snarfed by stealers like Nexus is commonly recovered and listed by knowledge leak aggregator companies like Intelligence X, which stories that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s gadget uncovered a whole bunch of largely poor and recycled passwords (utilizing the identical base password however barely completely different characters on the finish).
Those purloined credentials present the developer in query at one level used the identical seven-digit password to log in to Paradox.ai accounts for plenty of Fortune 500 corporations listed as prospects on the corporate’s web site, together with Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.
Seven-character passwords, significantly these consisting solely of numerals, are extremely weak to “brute-force” assaults that may strive a lot of doable password mixtures in fast succession. According to a much-referenced password energy information maintained by Hive Systems, trendy password-cracking programs can work out a seven quantity password roughly immediately.
Image: hivesystems.com.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Paradox.ai confirmed that the password knowledge was just lately stolen by a malware an infection on the private gadget of a longtime Paradox developer based mostly in Vietnam, and mentioned the corporate was made conscious of the compromise shortly after it occurred. Paradox maintains that few of the uncovered passwords had been nonetheless legitimate, and {that a} majority of them had been current on the worker’s private gadget solely as a result of he had migrated the contents of a password supervisor from an previous laptop.
Paradox additionally identified that it has been requiring single sign-on (SSO) authentication since 2020 that enforces multi-factor authentication for its companions. Still, a evaluation of the uncovered passwords exhibits they included the Vietnamese administrator’s credentials to the corporate’s SSO platform — paradoxai.okta.com. The password for that account led to 202506 — presumably a reference to the month of June 2025 — and the digital cookie left behind after a profitable Okta login with these credentials says it was legitimate till December 2025.
Also uncovered had been the administrator’s credentials and authentication cookies for an account at Atlassian, a platform made for software program improvement and challenge administration. The expiration date for that authentication token likewise was December 2025.
Infostealer infections are among the many main causes of knowledge breaches and ransomware assaults right this moment, and so they consequence within the theft of saved passwords and any credentials the sufferer varieties right into a browser. Most infostealer malware additionally will siphon authentication cookies saved on the sufferer’s gadget, and relying on how these tokens are configured thieves could possibly use them to bypass login prompts and/or multi-factor authentication.
Quite typically these infostealer infections will open a backdoor on the sufferer’s gadget that enables attackers to entry the contaminated machine remotely. Indeed, it seems that distant entry to the Paradox administrator’s compromised gadget was supplied on the market just lately.
In February 2019, Paradox.ai introduced it had efficiently accomplished audits for 2 pretty complete safety requirements (ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II). Meanwhile, the corporate’s safety disclosure this month says the check account with the atrocious 123456 username and password was final accessed in 2019, however someway missed of their annual penetration checks. So how did it handle to cross such stringent safety audits with these practices in place?
Paradox.ai informed KrebsOnSecurity that on the time of the 2019 audit, the corporate’s numerous contractors weren’t held to the identical safety requirements the corporate practices internally. Paradox emphasised that this has modified, and that it has up to date its safety and password necessities a number of instances since then.
It is unclear how the Paradox developer in Vietnam contaminated his laptop with malware, however a better evaluation finds a Windows gadget for one more Paradox.ai worker from Vietnam was compromised by related data-stealing malware on the finish of 2024 (that compromise included the sufferer’s GitHub credentials). In the case of each staff, the stolen credential knowledge consists of Web browser logs that point out the victims repeatedly downloaded pirated motion pictures and tv exhibits, which are sometimes bundled with malware disguised as a video codec wanted to view the pirated content material.