Poor Passwords Tattle on AI Hiring Bot Maker Paradox.ai

Security researchers recently revealed that the personal information of millions of people who applied for jobs at McDonald’s was exposed after they guessed the password (“123456”) for the fast food chain’s account at Paradox.ai, a company that makes artificial intelligence based hiring chatbots used by many Fortune 500 firms. Paradox.ai said the security oversight was an isolated incident that did not affect its other customers, but recent security breaches involving its employees in Vietnam tell a more nuanced story.

Earlier this month, security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry wrote about simple methods they found to access the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McHire.com, the McDonald’s website that many of its franchisees use to screen job applicants. As first reported by Wired, the researchers discovered that the weak password used by Paradox exposed 64 million records, including applicants’ names, email addresses and phone numbers.

Paradox.ai acknowledged the researchers’ findings but said the company’s other client instances were not affected, and that no sensitive information — such as Social Security numbers — was exposed.

“We are confident, based on our records, this test account was not accessed by any third party other than the security researchers,” the company wrote in a July 9 blog post. “It had not been logged into since 2019 and frankly, should have been decommissioned. We want to be very clear that while the researchers may have briefly had access to the system containing all chat interactions (NOT job applications), they only viewed and downloaded five chats in total that had candidate information within. Again, at no point was any data leaked online or made public.”

However, a review of stolen password data gathered by multiple breach-tracking services shows that at the end of June 2025, a Paradox.ai administrator in Vietnam suffered a malware compromise on their device that stole usernames and passwords for a variety of internal and third-party online services. The results were not pretty.

The password data from the Paradox.ai developer was stolen by a malware strain known as “Nexus Stealer,” a form grabber and password stealer that is sold on cybercrime forums. The information snarfed by stealers like Nexus is often recovered and indexed by data leak aggregator services like Intelligence X, which reports that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s device exposed hundreds of mostly poor and recycled passwords (using the same base password but slightly different characters at the end).

Those purloined credentials show the developer in question at one point used the same seven-digit password to log in to Paradox.ai accounts for a number of Fortune 500 firms listed as customers on the company’s website, including Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.

Seven-character passwords, particularly those consisting entirely of numerals, are highly vulnerable to “brute-force” attacks that can try a large number of possible password combinations in quick succession. According to a much-referenced password strength guide maintained by Hive Systems, modern password-cracking systems can work out a seven number password more or less instantly.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Paradox.ai confirmed that the password data was recently stolen by a malware infection on the personal device of a longtime Paradox developer based in Vietnam, and said the company was made aware of the compromise shortly after it happened. Paradox maintains that few of the exposed passwords were still valid, and that a majority of them were present on the employee’s personal device only because he had migrated the contents of a password manager from an old computer.

Paradox also pointed out that it has been requiring single sign-on (SSO) authentication since 2020 that enforces multi-factor authentication for its partners. Still, a review of the exposed passwords shows they included the Vietnamese administrator’s credentials to the company’s SSO platform — paradoxai.okta.com. The password for that account ended in 202506 — possibly a reference to the month of June 2025 — and the digital cookie left behind after a successful Okta login with those credentials says it was valid until December 2025.

Also exposed were the administrator’s credentials and authentication cookies for an account at Atlassian, a platform made for software development and project management. The expiration date for that authentication token likewise was December 2025.

Infostealer infections are among the leading causes of data breaches and ransomware attacks today, and they result in the theft of stored passwords and any credentials the victim types into a browser. Most infostealer malware also will siphon authentication cookies stored on the victim’s device, and depending on how those tokens are configured thieves may be able to use them to bypass login prompts and/or multi-factor authentication.

Quite often these infostealer infections will open a backdoor on the victim’s device that allows attackers to access the infected machine remotely. Indeed, it appears that remote access to the Paradox administrator’s compromised device was offered for sale recently.

In February 2019, Paradox.ai announced it had successfully completed audits for two fairly comprehensive security standards (ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II). Meanwhile, the company’s security disclosure this month says the test account with the atrocious 123456 username and password was last accessed in 2019, but somehow missed in their annual penetration tests. So how did it manage to pass such stringent security audits with these practices in place?

Paradox.ai told KrebsOnSecurity that at the time of the 2019 audit, the company’s various contractors were not held to the same security standards the company practices internally. Paradox emphasized that this has changed, and that it has updated its security and password requirements multiple times since then.

It is unclear how the Paradox developer in Vietnam infected his computer with malware, but a closer review finds a Windows device for another Paradox.ai employee from Vietnam was compromised by similar data-stealing malware at the end of 2024 (that compromise included the victim’s GitHub credentials). In the case of both employees, the stolen credential data includes Web browser logs that indicate the victims repeatedly downloaded pirated movies and television shows, which are often bundled with malware disguised as a video codec needed to view the pirated content.

Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs

The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.

Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform.

The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. “JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”

According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot — emerging in January 2021 — was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia.

“Unindicted co-conspirators would use the Espionage Variant to compromise computers around the world and steal sensitive diplomatic communications, credentials, and other data from these targeted victims,” reads a grand jury indictment dated Sept. 20, 2022. “This stolen data included financial transactions by diplomatic staff, correspondence concerning day-to-day diplomatic activity, as well as summaries of a particular country’s interactions with the United States.”

The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.

“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake.”

A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today’s operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYMRU, and ZScaler.

It’s not unheard of for financially-oriented malicious software to be repurposed for espionage. A variant of the ZeuS Trojan, which was used in countless online banking attacks against companies in the United States and Europe between 2007 and at least 2015, was for a time diverted to espionage tasks by its author.

As detailed in this 2015 story, the author of the ZeuS trojan created a custom version of the malware to serve purely as a spying machine, which scoured infected systems in Ukraine for specific keywords in emails and documents that would likely only be found in classified documents.

The public charging of the 16 DanaBot defendants comes a day after Microsoft joined a slew of tech companies in disrupting the IT infrastructure for another malware-as-a-service offering — Lumma Stealer, which is likewise offered to affiliates under tiered subscription prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 per month. Separately, Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit to seize control over 2,300 domain names used by Lumma Stealer and its affiliates.

Further reading:

Danabot: Analyzing a Fallen Empire

ZScaler blog: DanaBot Launches DDoS Attack Against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense

Flashpoint: Operation Endgame DanaBot Malware

Team CYMRU: Inside DanaBot’s Infrastructure: In Support of Operation Endgame II

March 2022 criminal complaint v. Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin

September 2022 grand jury indictment naming the 16 defendants

This Windows PowerShell Phish Has Scary Potential

Many GitHub users this week received a novel phishing email warning of critical security holes in their code. Those who clicked the link for details were asked to distinguish themselves from bots by pressing a combination of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft Windows to download password-stealing malware. While it’s unlikely that many programmers fell for this scam, it’s notable because less targeted versions of it are likely to be far more successful against the average Windows user.

A reader named Chris shared an email he received this week that spoofed GitHub’s security team and warned: “Hey there! We have detected a security vulnerability in your repository. Please contact us at https://github-scanner[.]com to get more information on how to fix this issue.”

Visiting that link generates a web page that asks the visitor to “Verify You Are Human” by solving an unusual CAPTCHA.

Clicking the “I’m not a robot” button generates a pop-up message asking the user to take three sequential steps to prove their humanity. Step 1 involves simultaneously pressing the keyboard key with the Windows icon and the letter “R,” which opens a Windows “Run” prompt that will execute any specified program that is already installed on the system.

Step 2 asks the user to press the “CTRL” key and the letter “V” at the same time, which pastes malicious code from the site’s virtual clipboard.

Step 3 — pressing the “Enter” key — causes Windows to launch a PowerShell command, and then fetch and execute a malicious file from github-scanner[.]com called “l6e.exe.”

PowerShell is a powerful, cross-platform automation tool built into Windows that is designed to make it simpler for administrators to automate tasks on a PC or across multiple computers on the same network.

According to an analysis at the malware scanning service Virustotal.com, the malicious file downloaded by the pasted text is called Lumma Stealer, and it’s designed to snarf any credentials stored on the victim’s PC.

This phishing campaign may not have fooled many programmers, who no doubt natively understand that pressing the Windows and “R” keys will open up a “Run” prompt, or that Ctrl-V will dump the contents of the clipboard.

But I bet the same approach would work just fine to trick some of my less tech-savvy friends and relatives into running malware on their PCs. I’d also bet none of these people have ever heard of PowerShell, let alone had occasion to intentionally launch a PowerShell terminal.

Given those realities, it would be nice if there were a simple way to disable or at least heavily restrict PowerShell for normal end users for whom it could become more of a liability.

However, Microsoft strongly advises against nixing PowerShell because some core system processes and tasks may not function properly without it. What’s more, doing so requires tinkering with sensitive settings in the Windows registry, which can be a dicey undertaking even for the learned.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to share this article with the Windows users in your life who fit the less-savvy profile. Because this particular scam has a great deal of room for growth and creativity.

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