Safety researchers just lately revealed that the private info 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 stated the safety oversight was an remoted incident that didn’t have an effect on its different clients, however latest 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 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, electronic mail addresses and cellphone numbers.
Paradox.ai acknowledged the researchers’ findings however stated the corporate’s different consumer cases weren’t affected, and that no delicate info — comparable to Social Safety numbers — was uncovered.
“We’re assured, based mostly on our data, this check account was not accessed by any third celebration apart from the safety researchers,” the corporate wrote in a July 9 weblog publish. “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 whole that had candidate info inside. Once more, at no level was any knowledge leaked on-line or made public.”
Nonetheless, a evaluation of stolen password knowledge gathered by a number of breach-tracking companies reveals 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 quite a lot 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 often known as “Nexus Stealer,” a type grabber and password stealer that’s bought on cybercrime boards. The knowledge snarfed by stealers like Nexus is usually recovered and listed by knowledge leak aggregator companies like Intelligence X, which reviews that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s gadget uncovered a whole lot 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 a lot of Fortune 500 corporations listed as clients on the corporate’s web site, together with Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.
Seven-character passwords, significantly these consisting totally of numerals, are extremely weak to “brute-force” assaults that may attempt a lot of potential password combos in fast succession. Based on a much-referenced password energy information maintained by Hive Programs, trendy password-cracking programs can work out a seven quantity password kind of immediately.
Picture: 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 stated 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 gadget solely as a result of he had migrated the contents of a password supervisor from an outdated pc.
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 evaluation of the uncovered passwords reveals 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.
Additionally uncovered have been the administrator’s credentials and authentication cookies for an account at Atlassian, a platform made for software program growth 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 immediately, and so they outcome within the theft of saved passwords and any credentials the sufferer sorts 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.
Very often these infostealer infections will open a backdoor on the sufferer’s gadget that permits attackers to entry the contaminated machine remotely. Certainly, it seems that distant entry to the Paradox administrator’s compromised gadget was provided 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 Sort II). In the meantime, the corporate’s safety disclosure this month says the check account with the atrocious 123456 username and password was final accessed in 2019, however in some way missed of their annual penetration assessments. So how did it handle to go such stringent safety audits with these practices in place?
Paradox.ai advised KrebsOnSecurity that on the time of the 2019 audit, the corporate’s varied 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 pc with malware, however a better evaluation finds a Home windows gadget for an additional Paradox.ai worker from Vietnam was compromised by comparable 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 Net browser logs that point out the victims repeatedly downloaded pirated films and tv reveals, which are sometimes bundled with malware disguised as a video codec wanted to view the pirated content material.
