Safety researchers not too long ago revealed that the non-public 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 primarily based 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 workers in Vietnam inform a extra nuanced story.
A screenshot of the paradox.ai homepage displaying 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 a lot of its franchisees use to display job candidates. As first reported by Wired, the researchers found that the weak password utilized by Paradox uncovered 64 million information, together with candidates’ names, electronic mail addresses and telephone numbers.
Paradox.ai acknowledged the researchers’ findings however mentioned the corporate’s different consumer situations weren’t affected, and that no delicate data — akin to Social Safety numbers — was uncovered.
“We’re assured, primarily based on our information, this take a look at account was not accessed by any third occasion apart from the safety researchers,” the corporate wrote in a July 9 weblog put up. “It had not been logged into since 2019 and admittedly, ought to have been decommissioned. We need to be very clear that whereas the researchers could have briefly had entry to the system containing all chat interactions (NOT job purposes), they solely seen and downloaded 5 chats in complete that had candidate data inside. Once more, at no level was any knowledge leaked on-line or made public.”
Nevertheless, a overview of stolen password knowledge gathered by a number of breach-tracking providers exhibits that on the finish of June 2025, a Paradox.ai administrator in Vietnam suffered a malware compromise on their machine that stole usernames and passwords for a wide range of inner and third-party on-line providers. 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 type grabber and password stealer that’s bought on cybercrime boards. The data snarfed by stealers like Nexus is usually recovered and listed by knowledge leak aggregator providers like Intelligence X, which experiences that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s machine uncovered tons of of largely poor and recycled passwords (utilizing the identical base password however barely totally different characters on the finish).
These purloined credentials present the developer in query at one level used the identical seven-digit password to log in to Paradox.ai accounts for quite a lot 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 susceptible to “brute-force” assaults that may strive a lot of attainable password combos in fast succession. In keeping with a much-referenced password energy information maintained by Hive Techniques, fashionable password-cracking methods can work out a seven quantity password roughly immediately.
Picture: hivesystems.com.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Paradox.ai confirmed that the password knowledge was not too long ago stolen by a malware an infection on the non-public machine of a longtime Paradox developer primarily based in Vietnam, and mentioned the corporate was made conscious of the compromise shortly after it occurred. Paradox maintains that few of the uncovered passwords have been nonetheless legitimate, and {that a} majority of them have been current on the worker’s private machine solely as a result of he had migrated the contents of a password supervisor from an outdated laptop.
Paradox additionally identified that it has been requiring single sign-on (SSO) authentication since 2020 that enforces multi-factor authentication for its companions. Nonetheless, a overview 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 — probably 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.
Additionally uncovered have been the administrator’s credentials and authentication cookies for an account at Atlassian, a platform made for software program improvement and undertaking 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 at this time, they usually 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 machine, and relying on how these tokens are configured thieves could possibly use them to bypass login prompts and/or multi-factor authentication.
Very often these infostealer infections will open a backdoor on the sufferer’s machine that permits attackers to entry the contaminated machine remotely. Certainly, it seems that distant entry to the Paradox administrator’s compromised machine was supplied on the market not too long ago.
In February 2019, Paradox.ai introduced it had efficiently accomplished audits for 2 pretty complete safety requirements (ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Sort II). In the meantime, the corporate’s safety disclosure this month says the take a look at account with the atrocious 123456 username and password was final accessed in 2019, however someway missed of their annual penetration assessments. So how did it handle to go 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 occasions since then.
It’s unclear how the Paradox developer in Vietnam contaminated his laptop with malware, however a better overview finds a Home windows machine for an additional 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). Within the case of each workers, the stolen credential knowledge consists of Internet 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.
