Safety researchers just lately revealed that the non-public data of hundreds of thousands 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 clients, however latest safety breaches involving its staff 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 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 information, together with candidates’ names, e mail addresses and cellphone numbers.
Paradox.ai acknowledged the researchers’ findings however mentioned the corporate’s different shopper cases weren’t affected, and that no delicate data — resembling 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 blog post. “It had not been logged into since 2019 and admittedly, ought to have been decommissioned. We wish to be very clear that whereas the researchers could have briefly had entry to the system containing all chat interactions (NOT job functions), they solely considered and downloaded 5 chats in whole that had candidate data inside. Once more, at no level was any knowledge leaked on-line or made public.”
Nonetheless, a overview 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 system 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 called “Nexus Stealer,” a type grabber and password stealer that’s bought on cybercrime boards. The data snarfed by stealers like Nexus is commonly recovered and listed by knowledge leak aggregator companies like Intelligence X, which experiences that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s system uncovered a whole lot of largely poor and recycled passwords (utilizing the identical base password however barely completely 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 plenty of Fortune 500 firms listed as customers on the company’s website, together with Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.
Seven-character passwords, notably these consisting solely of numerals, are extremely weak to “brute-force” assaults that may strive a lot of doable password mixtures in fast succession. In keeping with a much-referenced password strength guide maintained by Hive Programs, trendy password-cracking programs 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 just lately stolen by a malware an infection on the non-public system 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 system 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 resulted in 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 mission 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 system, and relying on how these tokens are configured thieves might be able to use them to bypass login prompts and/or multi-factor authentication.
Very often these infostealer infections will open a backdoor on the sufferer’s system that enables attackers to entry the contaminated machine remotely. Certainly, it seems that distant entry to the Paradox administrator’s compromised system was provided on the market just lately.
In February 2019, Paradox.ai announced 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 one way or the other missed of their annual penetration assessments. So how did it handle to cross 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 instances since then.
It’s unclear how the Paradox developer in Vietnam contaminated his laptop with malware, however a more in-depth overview finds a Home windows system 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 staff, the stolen credential knowledge contains Internet browser logs that point out the victims repeatedly downloaded pirated films and tv exhibits, which are sometimes bundled with malware disguised as a video codec wanted to view the pirated content material.
