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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

#61

Post by simonw »

danenania wrote: post #37
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, gotta admit I'm a bit disappointed here. This was a run-of-the-mill SQL injection, albeit one discovered by a vulnerability scanning LLM agent. I thought we might finally have a high profile prompt injection attack against a name-brand company we could point people to.

> I thought we might finally have a high profile prompt injection attack against a name-brand company we could point people to. These folks have found a bunch: https://www.promptarmor.com/resources But I guess you mean one that has been exploited in the wild?

Yeah I'm still optimistic that people will start taking this threat seriously once there's been a high profile exploit against a real target.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#62

Post by skybrian »

vanillameow wrote: post #36
codechicago277 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picked up a vibe, but couldn’t confirm it until the last paragraph, but yeah clearly drafted with at least major AI help.

Can we stop softening the blow? This isn't "drafted with at least major AI help", it's just straight up AI slop writing. Let's call a spade a spade. I have yet to meet anyone claiming they "write with AI help but thoughts are my own" that had anything interesting to say. I don't particularly agree with a lot of Simon Willison's posts but his proofreading prompt should pretty much be the line on what constitutes accep…

Your reaction is worse than the article. There's no way you could know for sure what their writing process was, but that doesn't stop you from making overconfident claims.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#63

Post by frankfrank13 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #52
frankfrank13 wrote: post #33

Some insider knowledge: Lilli was, at least a year ago, internal only. VPN access, SSO, all the bells and whistles, required. Not sure when that changed. McKinsey requires hiring an external pen-testing company to launch even to a small group of coworkers. I can forgive this kind of mistake on the part of the Lilli devs. A lot of things have to fail for an "agentic" security company to even find a public endpoint, mu…

Net conclusion: Don’t hire McKinsey to advise on AI implementation or tech org design and practices if they can’t get it right themselves.

Fair take, but you'd be hard pressed to find much resemblance to any advice McK gives to its own practices.

Pre-AI, I always said McK is good at analysis, if you need complicated analysis done, hire a consulting firm.

If you need strategy, custom software, org design, etc. I think you should figure out the analysis that needs to be done, shoot that off to a consulting firm, and then make your decision.

IME, F500 execs are delegation machines. When they wake up every morning with 30 things to delegate, and 25 execs to delegate to, they hire 5 consulting teams. Whether you hire Mck, or Deloitte, or Accenture will only come down to:

1. Your personal relationships

2. Your company's policies on procurement

3. Your budget

in that order.

McK's "secret sauce" is that if you, the exec, don't like the powerpoint pages Mck put in front of you, 3 try-hard, insecure, ivy-league educated analysts will work 80 hours to make pages you do like. A sr. partner will take you to dinner. You'll get invited to conferences and summits and roundtables, and then next time you look for a job, it will be easier.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#64

Post by sigmar »

doron wrote: post #43
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

>A McKinsey spokesperson told The Register that it fixed all of the issues identified by CodeWall within hours of learning about the problems.

Ah. Thanks for the link. I'm suspicious of everything posted to a blog without proof these days.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#65

Post by nubg »

Could the author please provide the prompt that was used to vibe write this blog post? The topic is interesting, but I would rather read the original prompt, as I am not sure which parts still match what the author wanted to say, vs flowerly formulations for captivating reading that the LLM produced.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#66

Post by m4rtink »

cmiles8 wrote: post #52
frankfrank13 wrote: post #33

Some insider knowledge: Lilli was, at least a year ago, internal only. VPN access, SSO, all the bells and whistles, required. Not sure when that changed. McKinsey requires hiring an external pen-testing company to launch even to a small group of coworkers. I can forgive this kind of mistake on the part of the Lilli devs. A lot of things have to fail for an "agentic" security company to even find a public endpoint, mu…

Net conclusion: Don’t hire McKinsey to advise on AI implementation or tech org design and practices if they can’t get it right themselves.

This can be simplified further: "Don't hire McKinsey." ;-)

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#67

Post by darkport »

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.

Founder of CodeWall here. It's quite funny because whilst an LLM did write the bulk of the posts factual content (based on the agents findings), I wrote the intro and summary at the end. That's just my writing style. Feel free to read my personal blog to compare: https://darkport.co.uk

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#68

Post by simonw »

VadimPR wrote: post #42

I wonder how these offensive AI agents are being built? I am guessing with off the shelf open LLMs, finetuned to remove safety training, with the agentic loop thrown in. Does anyone know for sure?

Honestly you can point regular Claude Code or Codex CLI at a web app and tell it to start a penetration test and get surprisingly good results from their default configurations.

Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

#70

Post by eisa01 »

frankfrank13 wrote: post #33

Some insider knowledge: Lilli was, at least a year ago, internal only. VPN access, SSO, all the bells and whistles, required. Not sure when that changed. McKinsey requires hiring an external pen-testing company to launch even to a small group of coworkers. I can forgive this kind of mistake on the part of the Lilli devs. A lot of things have to fail for an "agentic" security company to even find a public endpoint, mu…

Maybe it was opened up so it could be used in recruiting?

McKinsey challenges graduates to use AI chatbot in recruitment overhaul: https://www.ft.com/content/de7855f0-f586-4708-a8ed-f0458eb25...

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