Fans of the Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs will undoubtedly remember Dark Helmet’s shock at the simplicity of the password protecting the Druidian Air Shield. An incredulous Helmet roared, “1-2-3-4-5? That’s the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!” Unfortunately, reports note, it is also the same kind of password used to protect job seekers’ information on the McDonald’s (MCD) hiring app. That revelation did little to hurt McDonald’s stock, as shares were up over 2% in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
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McDonald’s hiring policies, in many cases, run through Olivia, an AI chatbot that runs a lot of the basic screening for potential McDonald’s employees. It gets things like contact data, work history, and so on. These are the kinds of things that help winnow down the pool of applicants before going to the interview phase with a human. But as it turns out, the password protection scheme protecting the data Olivia harvested was also shockingly simplistic. Apparently, all a hacker needed to do to get in was guess a username and supply the password: “123456.”
A pair of security researchers, Sam Curry and Ian Carroll, revealed recently the disturbingly simple methods used to slip into the backend code on McHire.com. There, the pair found that “…simple web-based vulnerabilities—including guessing one laughably weak password (the aforementioned 123456)—allowed them to access a Paradox.ai account and query the company’s databases that held every McHire user’s chats with Olivia.” This included roughly 64 million records, complete with a flood of personally-identifiable information.
Snack Wraps Mean Goldman Sachs Upgrade
Thankfully, there was good news for McDonald’s in the picture as well. Goldman Sachs analyst Christine Cho—who has a three-star rating on TipRanks—recently upgraded McDonald’s from Neutral to Buy, though she maintained the $345 per share price target currently held on McDonald’s stock.
While Cho acknowledged that the environment for any sort of restaurant right now is challenging, the combination of McDonald’s scale, marketing, and digital operations was likely to make all the difference. The new “daily double burger” on the McValue platform, as well as the return of the snack wrap, were also likely to fuel some gains for McDonald’s going forward.
Is McDonald’s Stock a Good Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on MCD stock based on 15 Buys, 14 Holds and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 15% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MCD price target of $338.54 per share implies 12.86% upside potential.
