McDonald’s Got Hacked Because Their Password Was ‘123456’

They should have gone for the tried-and-true “hunter2.”

By Braden Bjella

Published 4 months ago in Facepalm

No one is saying coming up with a strong password is easy — Lord knows Apple’s “suggest a strong password” option is a load of nonsense — but you’ve definitely gotta try harder than this.


McDonald’s currently uses an A.I. platform, called “McHire,” to recruit employees. Security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry recently discovered that all it took to get admin access to the platform was entering the username “123456” and the password “123456.”


Yes, really.


From there, they were able to access chat transcripts, contact info and job-form data from applicants. This meant that they were able to view not only contact details, but even some of the weirder parts of the modern hiring process, such as applicants’ outcomes on personality tests.


This security flaw has since been fixed, McDonald’s says, but has anyone tried just inputting “1234567” this time around and seeing if that works?

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