Latest news with #securityflaws
Yahoo
30-07-2025
- Yahoo
iPhone update: Owners told to update Apple devices to iOS 18.6 now
iPhone users have been urged update their Apple devices to fix a host of security flaws. iOS 18.6 is a major update but does not bring significant new features, instead focusing on fixing stability and security. The primary change is a fix to the Photos app, which is sometimes unable to share 'memory movies'. That is an AI-powered feature that allows users to ask for a specific set of photos to be stitched together into an emotive film. But it includes a host of other security and bug fixes, some of which patch potentially dangerous vulnerabilities. As such, security experts advised users to fix them now. 'iOS 18.6 contains fixes for over 20 bugs and vulnerabilities. Given that this update is smaller and largely focused on security enhancements, we recommend users update as quickly as possible,' said by Josh Stein, VP of Strategy, Security at Jamf. Many of those bugs were inside frameworks and other technologies that are used across Apple's apps, he noted – though there is no evidence they have actually been exploited. The update comes soon after Apple made the first public version of iOS 26 available. As Apple gets close to the release of that new update – likely in September, alongside the new iPhones – new updates to the existing iOS 18 are unlikely to include dramatic new changes.
WIRED
09-07-2025
- Business
- WIRED
McDonald's AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants' Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456'
Jul 9, 2025 3:28 PM Basic security flaws left the personal info of tens of millions of McDonald's job-seekers vulnerable on the 'McHire' site built by AI software firm Photo-Illustration: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 resumé, 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 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 Curry revealed that they found simple methods to hack into the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McDonald's website that many of its franchisees use to handle job applications. Carroll and Curry, hackers with a long track record of independent security testing, discovered that simple web-based vulnerabilities—including guessing one laughably weak password—allowed them to access a 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.' When WIRED reached out to McDonald's and for comment, a spokesperson for shared a blog post the company planned to publish that confirmed Carroll and Curry's findings. The company noted that only a fraction of the records Carroll and Curry accessed contained personal information, and said it had verified that the account with the '123456' password that exposed the information 'was not accessed by any third party' other than the researchers. The company also added that it's instituting a bug bounty program to better catch security vulnerabilities in the future. 'We do not take this matter lightly, even though it was resolved swiftly and effectively,' chief legal officer, Stephanie King, told WIRED in an interview. 'We own this.' In its own statement to WIRED, McDonald's agreed that was to blame. 'We're disappointed by this unacceptable vulnerability from a third-party provider, As soon as we learned of the issue, we mandated 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.' One of the exposed interactions between a job applicant and 'Olivia.' Courtesy of Ian Carroll and Sam Curry Carroll says he became interested in the security of the McHire website after spotting a Reddit post complaining about McDonald's hiring chatbot wasting applicants' time with nonsense responses and misunderstandings. He and Curry started talking to the chatbot themselves, testing it for 'prompt injection' vulnerabilities that can enable someone to hijack a large language model and bypass its safeguards by sending it certain commands. When they couldn't find any such flaws, they decided to see what would happen if they signed up as a McDonald's franchisee to get access to the backend of the site, but instead spotted a curious login link on for staff at the company that built the site. On a whim, Carroll says he tried two of the most common sets of login credentials: The username and password 'admin," and then the username and password '123456.' The second of those two tries worked. 'It's more common than you'd think,' Carroll says. There appeared to be no multi-factor authentication for that login page. With those credentials, Carroll and Curry could see they now had administrator access to a test McDonald's 'restaurant' on McHire, and they figured out all the employees listed there appeared to be developers, seemingly based in Vietnam. They found a link within the platform to apparent test job postings for that nonexistent McDonald's location, clicked on one posting, applied to it, and could see their own application on the backend system they now had access to. (In its blog post, notes that the test account had 'not been logged into since 2019 and frankly, should have been decommissioned.') That's when Carroll and Curry discovered the second critical vulnerability in McHire: When they started messing with the applicant ID number for their application—a number somewhere above 64 million—they found that they could increment it down to a smaller number and see someone else 's chat logs and contact information. The two security researchers hesitated to access too many applicants' records for fear of privacy violations or hacking charges, but when they spot-checked a handful of the 64-million-plus IDs, all of them showed very real applicant information. ( says that the researchers accessed seven records in total, and five contained personal information of people who had interacted with the McHire site.) Carroll and Curry also shared with WIRED a small sample of the applicants' names, contact information, and the date of their applications. WIRED got in touch with two applicants via their exposed contact information and they confirmed they had applied for jobs at McDonald's on the specified dates. The personal information exposed by security lapses isn't the most sensitive, Carroll and Curry note. But the risk for the applicants, they argue, is heightened by the fact that the data is associated with the knowledge of their employment at McDonald's—or their intention to get a job there. 'The phishing risk is actually massive,' says Curry. 'It's not just people's personally identifiable information and resume. It's that information for people who are looking for a job at McDonald's, people who are eager and waiting for emails back.' That means the data could be used by fraudsters impersonating McDonald's recruiters and asking for financial information to set up a direct deposit, for instance. 'If you wanted to do some sort of payroll scam, this is a good approach,' Curry says. The exposure of applicants' attempts—and in some cases failures—to get what is often a minimum wage job could also be a source of embarrassment, the two hackers point out. But Carroll notes that he would never suggest that anyone should be ashamed of working under the Golden Arches. 'I have nothing but respect," he says. 'I go to McDonald's all the time.'
The Verge
30-06-2025
- The Verge
Hundreds of Brother printer models have an unpatchable security flaw
Serious security flaws have been found in hundreds of Brother printer models that could allow attackers to remotely access devices that are still using default passwords. Eight new vulnerabilities, one of which cannot be fixed by patching the firmware, were discovered in 689 kinds of Brother home and enterprise printers by security company Rapid7. The flaws also impact 59 printer models from Fujifilm, Toshiba, Ricoh, and Konica Minolta, but not every vulnerability is found on every printer model. If you own a Brother printer, you can check to see if your model is affected here. The most serious security flaw, tracked under CVE-2024-51978 in the National Vulnerability Database, has a 9.8 'Critical' CVSS rating and allows attackers to generate the device's default admin password if they know the serial number of the printer they're targeting. This allows attackers to exploit the other seven vulnerabilities discovered by Rapid7, which include retrieving sensitive information, crashing the device, opening TCP connections, performing arbitrary HTTP requests, and exposing passwords for connected network services. While seven of these security flaws can be fixed via firmware updates detailed in Rapid7's report, Brother indicated to the company that CVE-2024-51978 itself 'cannot be fully remediated in firmware,' and will be fixed via a change to the manufacturing process for future versions of affected printer models. For current models, Brother recommends that users change the default admin password for their printer via the device's Web-Based Management menu Changing default manufacturing passwords is something we should all be doing when we take a new device home anyway, and these printer vulnerabilities are a good example as to why.
