Safety researchers lately revealed that the non-public info of thousands and 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 companies. 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 lots 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 data, together with candidates’ names, electronic 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 info — reminiscent of Social Safety numbers — was uncovered.
“We’re assured, primarily based on our data, this take a look at account was not accessed by any third get together apart from the safety researchers,” the corporate wrote in a July 9 weblog submit. “It had not been logged into since 2019 and albeit, ought to have been decommissioned. We need to be very clear that whereas the researchers might have briefly had entry to the system containing all chat interactions (NOT job functions), they solely seen and downloaded 5 chats in whole that had candidate info inside. Once more, at no level was any information leaked on-line or made public.”
Nevertheless, a evaluation of stolen password information 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 a wide range of inner and third-party on-line companies. The outcomes weren’t fairly.
The password information from the Paradox.ai developer was stolen by a malware pressure referred to as “Nexus Stealer,” a type grabber and password stealer that’s offered on cybercrime boards. The data snarfed by stealers like Nexus is commonly recovered and listed by information leak aggregator companies like Intelligence X, which studies that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s system uncovered a whole lot of principally 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 variety of Fortune 500 companies listed as prospects on the corporate’s web site, together with Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.
Seven-character passwords, significantly these consisting completely of numerals, are extremely weak to “brute-force” assaults that may attempt numerous potential password combos in fast succession. In line with a much-referenced password energy information maintained by Hive Programs, trendy 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 information was 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 had been nonetheless legitimate, and {that a} majority of them had 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 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.
Additionally uncovered had been the administrator’s credentials and authentication cookies for an account at Atlassian, a platform made for software program improvement and venture 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 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 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 permits attackers to entry the contaminated machine remotely. Certainly, it seems that distant entry to the Paradox administrator’s compromised system was supplied on the market lately.
In February 2019, Paradox.ai introduced it had efficiently accomplished audits for 2 pretty complete safety requirements (ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Kind 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 by some means missed of their annual penetration exams. 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 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 laptop with malware, however a more in-depth evaluation 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 workers, the stolen credential information 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.
