McDonald's AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants' Data To Hackers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: If you want a job at McDonald's today, there's a good chance you'll have to talk to Olivia. Olivia is not, in fact, a human being, but instead an AI chatbot that screens applicants, asks for their contact information and resume, directs them to a personality test, and occasionally makes them 'go insane' by repeatedly misunderstanding their most basic questions. Until last week, the platform that runs the Olivia chatbot, built by artificial intelligence software firm Paradox.ai, also suffered from absurdly basic security flaws. As a result, virtually any hacker could have accessed the records of every chat Olivia had ever had with McDonald's applicants -- including all the personal information they shared in those conversations -- with tricks as straightforward as guessing the username and password '123456.'

On Wednesday, security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curryrevealedthat they found simple methods to hack into the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McHire.com, McDonald's website that many of its franchisees use to handle job applications. Carroll and Curry, hackers with along track record of independent security testing, discovered that simple web-based vulnerabilities -- including guessing one laughably weak password -- allowed them to access a Paradox.ai account and query the company's databases that held every McHire user's chats with Olivia. The data appears to include as many as 64 million records, including applicants' names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Carroll says he only discovered that appalling lack of security around applicants' information because he was intrigued by McDonald's decision to subject potential new hires to an AI chatbot screener and personality test. '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. 'So I started applying for a job, and then after 30 minutes, we had full access to virtually every application that's ever been made to McDonald's going back years.' Paradox.ai confirmed the security findings, acknowledging that only a small portion of the accessed records contained personal data. The company stated that the weak-password account ('123456') was only accessed by the researchers and no one else. To prevent future issues, Paradox is launching a bug bounty program. 'We do not take this matter lightly, even though it was resolved swiftly and effectively,' Paradox.ai's chief legal officer, Stephanie King, told WIRED in an interview. 'We own this.'

In a statement to WIRED, McDonald's agreed that Paradox.ai was to blame. 'We're disappointed by this unacceptable vulnerability from a third-party provider, Paradox.ai. As soon as we learned of the issue, we mandated Paradox.ai to remediate the issue immediately, and it was resolved on the same day it was reported to us,' the statement reads. 'We take our commitment to cyber security seriously and will continue to hold our third-party providers accountable to meeting our standards of data protection.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.