A seller claims 1.7M McDonald’s employee records were stolen from Azure. An 8,000-row sample appears genuine, but its age and full size remain unconfirmed. A seller on a data-trading forum posted an 8,000-row sample this week claiming it came from McDonald’s own Azure tenant, part of a supposed 1.7 million-record employee directory obtained using stolen credentials. Ransomnews’s technical breakdown found the sample holds up as genuine on every test that can be run against it. What it can’t confirm, notably, is exactly how old the data is or whether the full 1.7 million figure is real. “The listing is a straightforward private sale, posted at 4:08 AM forum time under the title “McDonalds 1.7M+ Azure Internal Employee Dump”. The seller, an account called TheHatman, writes that the data was “downloaded directly from Azure Tenant using compromised credentials” and that it contains “employee accounts, service accounts, and other tenant account records”. No price is named. Buyers are invited to make offers.” reads the report published by Ransomnews. “To evidence the claim, the seller attached a free 8,000-record sample. That file is the entire basis for what follows. Ransomnews analysed it offline. We did not access, probe or authenticate against any McDonald’s system, and we have redacted the sample’s download location from the screenshot below because it still resolves to real people’s contact details.” The file’s structure gives away exactly what it is before you even read a single row. Column names like FacsimileTelephoneNumber and PhysicalDeliveryOfficeName aren’t something anyone invents; they’re the exact property names Microsoft’s own PowerShell directory tools return when an administrator exports a user list from Entra ID, the modern name for Azure Active Directory. Whoever produced this file ran a standard Microsoft export command and saved the output, nothing more exotic than that. Every one of the 50 email domains found in the sample is genuinely McDonald’s-controlled, spanning corporate staff, restaurant crew accounts, franchisee logins, and vendor guest access across more than thirty countries. Three rows even carry the tenant’s own built-in Microsoft address, mcdonaldscorp.onmicrosoft.com, something that’s invisible from outside the organization and simply isn’t guessable or scrapeable. Add in 233 rows with the exact kind of garbled text encoding that happens when someone forgets to specify UTF-8 during an export, plus 85 job titles cut off at precisely 30 characters mid-word, the unmistakable fingerprint of a fixed-width HR system field bleeding into the directory, and you get a picture consistent with a real export rather than something assembled from public sources. “The file is broken in the ways real exports are broken. 233 rows contain mangled characters: Königswinter appears as “Königswinter”, München as “München”, and Ukrainian job titles are rendered as unreadable strings of Cyrillic run through the wrong character set. This is what happens when somebody runs Export-Csv without specifying UTF-8 encoding.” continues the report. “It’s a mistake, and it is not the kind of mistake anybody makes on purpose. A fabricated dataset doesn’t come with authentic encoding damage.” One detail actually reaches outside the file entirely. A restaurant entry for “556 Upton” on Upton By-Pass in Wirral, complete with phone number, matches a real, publicly listed McDonald’s location down to the digit. That’s a small anchor, but it’s the kind of anchor fabricated data doesn’t usually survive contact with. What the sample genuinely can’t settle is timing. There isn’t a single date field anywhere in the schema, no creation date, no last login, nothing to age a row by. “We can say with confidence that the data came out of McDonald’s directory. We cannot say from the file alone when it came out.” The best clue available is McDonald’s own market footprint: no Russian records at all, consistent with the company’s 2022 exit, and no Kazakh ones either, which points to sometime in 2023 or later, a wide window rather than a firm date. The 1.7 million headline number also isn’t something 8,000 rows can verify. That sample is under half a percent of the claim, and while nothing in it looks implausible given McDonald’s global workforce size, plausible isn’t the same thing as confirmed. A seller running a volume trade across multiple companies has every incentive to round the number up in the listing title. This McDonald’s post wasn’t an isolated event either. The same account, going by TheHatman, posted nine listings in total over sixteen days, claiming roughly 3.6 million records combined across McDonald’s, Vodafone, Gap, two hotel chains, and four major IT outsourcing firms including Kyndryl and Tata Consultancy Services. Every listing uses an identical 19-column schema and nearly identical wording, the kind of consistency you get from one person running the same export script against whatever tenant they currently hold a working login for, not from someone fabricating nine separate datasets by hand. That pattern points toward something fairly mundane and fairly common: infostealer malware harvesting saved credentials at scale, feeding a resale market that lets one operator walk into tenant after tenant using logins nobody bothered to protect with multi-factor authentication. Reading an entire company directory doesn’t require a sophisticated intrusion; it requires one working account in a tenant that hasn’t restricted user enumeration, which is Entra ID’s default setting unless an administrator has explicitly locked it down. For anyone at McDonald’s or one of the other eight listed companies, the real risk here isn’t account takeover, since there are no passwords or hashes in the sample at all. It’s social engineering: full names, job titles, direct phone numbers, and internal email formats are more than enough to make a fake helpdesk call or a fraudulent invoice sound completely legitimate. Treat unsolicited contact that already knows your role and your location with more suspicion than usual, because that’s precisely the kind of detail this file was built to hand someone. “For individuals named in the data, there is no action that removes the exposure.” concludes the report.”The realistic response is scepticism about unsolicited contact that arrives already knowing your role and your store, and a refusal to act on instructions that arrive by phone or email without out-of-band confirmation.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, McDonald’s)
A maximum-severity security vulnerability impacting SAP Commerce Cloud is witnessing active exploitation efforts. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-58231, is rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It relates to an instance of insufficient authorization checks and input validation. "SAP Commerce Cloud allows an unauthenticated attacker to abuse a default authentication client and submit
Google Workspace attacks do not always begin with phishing. Stolen OAuth tokens can provide another path into Gmail, Drive, and connected systems. Material Security explains why organizations need defenses that cover the entire Workspace attack chain.
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a large-scale, global recruitment-themed phishing campaign that uses fake interview scheduling pages and Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) windows to steal Google and Facebook credentials and, in more advanced cases, relay multi-factor authentication (MFA) prompts in real time. CTM360, which detailed the activity in a new report titled RecruitTrap, said it
A former data analyst contractor for Brightly Software has been sentenced to two years in prison for targeting his employer in a $2.5 million extortion scheme. Brightly is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company formerly known as SchoolDude, which was acquired by Siemens in August 2022. Brightly employs over 700 people and provides asset management and maintenance software to more than 12,000 clients worldwide. 27-year-old North Carolina man Cameron Curry (also known as "Loot") was found guilty in March of orchestrating an "extensive cyber extortion scheme" targeting his employer. According to court documents, Curry stole sensitive documents after gaining access to the company's payroll information and corporate data, which he later used to extort Brightly after learning that his six-month contract wouldn't be extended.
IAM compliance is the practice of demonstrating that identity and access controls are not only documented but actually enforced across users, applications, infrastructure, and non-human identities. This guide explains what IAM compliance requires, which regulations matter, and how organizations move from periodic access reviews toward continuous, evidence-backed verification that auditors can
Hackers began targeting a critical Adobe Commerce flaw that could let unauthenticated attackers hijack customer accounts and access private data. Hackers began targeting CVE-2026-71362 (CVSS score of 9.1), a critical Adobe Commerce flaw, shortly after its public disclosure. The vulnerability allows unauthenticated attackers to switch customer sessions, hijack accounts and access private data. Cybersecurity firm Sansec blocked the first exploitation attempts after Adobe published its advisory. The flaw affects Commerce, Commerce B2B and Magento Open Source versions through the July 2026 patches. Adobe released an isolated fix and urged users to patch. “Adobe has released APSB26-92 as isolated patch files. The update fixes seven vulnerabilities, including an unauthenticated customer account takeover with a CVSS score of 9.1. Sansec Shield already blocks exploitation attempts.” reads the advisory published by Sansec. “Sansec reviewed the patch and confirmed that the vulnerability lets attackers switch a customer session to another customer account. This gives them access to the victim’s account and private customer data.” Sansec pointed out that an attacker can exploit the flaw without existing account, administrator privileges, or user interaction. Adobe fixed how Magento handles customer identity in account sessions. The remaining flaws include stored cross-site scripting and authorization issues. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Adobe)
An ongoing data theft campaign uses custom tools to steal data exposed to anonymous users through Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow customer portals. The data-theft campaign, dubbed City-Forum by SaaS security firm Reco, has been traced to a single server that has targeted multiple organizations worldwide. These organizations include telecommunications companies, banks and financial services firms, enterprise software vendors, security and data privacy companies, and public-sector portals. Reco says the attacks are ongoing, with activity continuing to increase. Reco says all of the attacks originate from the IP address 158.220.87.79, hosted by German VPS provider Contabo, and almost always use the default Go-http-client/1.1 user agent when downloading data. This IP address is associated with the city-forum.com domain, which has resolved to the server since at least March 2025, indicating that the infrastructure has remained in place for more than a year.
A new Android NFC relay malware called WindRelay is being used alongside the SpyNote remote administration tool (RAT) to steal card data and send it to attackers in real time. In an incident investigated by the cybersecurity company Group-IB, a fraudster impersonated a bank employee and called the victim under the pretense of a problem with their payment card. During the call, the threat actor instructed the victim to sideload the SpyNote RAT disguised as a legitimate app and grant it Accessibility Service permissions, giving the attacker remote access to the Android device. To add credibility, the attacker personalized the malicious app label with the victim's name. After gaining remote access to the device through SpyNote, the attacker installed WindRelay without further interaction with the victim and used the banking app to take out a loan in the victim’s name.
A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability, published by cybersecurity company Rapid7 on Tuesday, is already being used in attacks. Tracked as CVE-2026-55040, this authentication bypass security flaw in the JWT token validation pipeline can be exploited by attackers without privileges to perform operations as a SharePoint site user or administrator. Microsoft patched the vulnerability as part of the July 2026 Patch Tuesday updates, when it warned customers to patch systems running SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016 and SharePoint Server 2019. "The authentication feature could be bypassed as this vulnerability allows impersonation," it said. "Exploiting this vulnerability could allow an attacker to disclose files and modify data, but the attacker cannot impact the availability of the system."
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