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How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

codewall.ai

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Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#41

Post by palmotea »

With all we've been learning from stuff like the Epstein emails, it would have been nice if someone had leaked this data:

> 46.5 million chat messages. From a workforce that uses this tool to discuss strategy, client engagements, financials, M&A activity, and internal research. Every conversation, stored in plaintext, accessible without authentication.

> 728,000 files. 192,000 PDFs. 93,000 Excel spreadsheets. 93,000 PowerPoint decks. 58,000 Word documents. The filenames alone were sensitive and a direct download URL for anyone who knew where to look.

I'm sure lots of very informative journalism could have been done about how corporate power actually works behind the scenes.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#43

Post by doron »

sigmar wrote: post #21

I've got no idea who codewall is. Is there acknowledgment from McKinsey that they actually patched the issue referenced? I don't see any reference to "codewall ai" in any news article before yesterday and there's no names on the site. https://www.google.com/search?q=codewall+ai

it is weird isn't it? The register article implies that it's acknowledged by McKinsey- https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/09/mckinsey_ai_chatbot_h...

Edit: Apparently, this is the CEO https://github.com/eth0izzle

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#44

Post by consp »

sgt101 wrote: post #3

Why was there a public endpoint? Surely this should all have been behind the firewall and accessible only from a corporate device associated mac address?

> accessible only from a corporate device associated mac address

Like that ever stopped anyone. That's just a checkbox item.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#45

Post by consp »

causal wrote: post #26
sd9 wrote: post #4

Cool but impossible to read with all the LLM-isms

Those short "punchy sentence" paragraphs are my new trigger: > No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream. It just sounds so stupid.

It's an actual story telling method, molded into a supposed to be informative article with a bunch of "please make it interesting" sprinkled on top of it. These day known as the what's left of the internet.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#46

Post by alexpotato »

fhd2 wrote: post #8

> This was McKinsey & Company — a firm with world-class technology teams [...] Not exactly the word on the street in my experience. Is McKinsey more respected for software than I thought? Otherwise I'm curious why TFA didn't just politely leave this bit out.

They generally hire smart people who are good at a combination of:

- understanding existing systems

- what the paint points are

- making suggestions on how to improve those systems given the paint points

- that includes a mix of tech changes, process updates and/or new systems etc

Now, when it comes to implementing this, in my experience it usually ends up being the already in place dev teams.

Source: worked at a large investment bank that hired McKinsey and I knew one of the consultants from McK prior to working at the bank.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#47

Post by cs702 »

... in two hours:

> No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream. ... Within 2 hours, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production database.

Having seen firsthand how insecure some enterprise systems are, I'm not exactly surprised. Decision makers at the top are focused first and foremost on corporate and personal exposure to liability, also known as CYA in corporate-speak. The nitty-gritty details of security are always left to people far down the corporate chain who are supposed to know what they're doing.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#48

Post by sharadov »

fhd2 wrote: post #8

> This was McKinsey & Company — a firm with world-class technology teams [...] Not exactly the word on the street in my experience. Is McKinsey more respected for software than I thought? Otherwise I'm curious why TFA didn't just politely leave this bit out.

No, they don't have world class technology teams, they hire contractors to do all the tech stuff, their expertise is in management, yes that's world class.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#49

Post by doctorpangloss »

joenot443 wrote: post #15

> One of those unprotected endpoints wrote user search queries to the database. The values were safely parameterised, but the JSON keys — the field names — were concatenated directly into SQL. I was expecting prompt injection, but in this case it was just good ol' fashioned SQL injection, possible only due to the naivety of the LLM which wrote McKinsey's AI platform.

The tacit knowledge to put oauth2-proxy in front of anything deployed on the Internet will nonetheless earn me $0 this year, while Anthropic will make billions.
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