🛡 Hackers Accessed McDonald's HR Bot and All Its Data in Just Half an Hour
McDonald's uses the McHire platform with an AI bot named Olivia to screen potential employees. Job seekers communicate with the bot and take personality tests with its help.
Ian Carroll and Sam Curry, hackers with a long track record of independent security testing, became interested in the platform's reliability after a Reddit post where users complained about meaningless questions from Olivia.
"I just thought it was pretty uniquely dystopian compared to a normal hiring process, right? And that's what made me want to look into it more," says Carroll.
Hackers applied for jobs at McDonald's and, within 30 minutes, gained access to the personal data of 64 million people who had sent resumes to the company in recent years. The data included phone numbers, email addresses, and chats with a bot.
They've hacked the system on the second attempt, entered 123456 as the admin login and password.
The McHire platform's developer, Paradox.ai, stated that only the two hackers had accessed the applicants' personal data and promised to enhance the security system shortly.
