A hacking group is claiming to have leaked over 38,000 print-at-home tickets from Ticketmaster for 154 upcoming concerts including Taylor Swift’s "Eras Tour," Pearl Jam, Phish and Foo Fighters, multiple industry publications have reported.
It’s all part of an ongoing alleged extortion scheme against Ticketmaster, which began in May when a well-known hacker group named ShinyHunters stole personal data from over 500 million Ticketmaster customers and sold it on the dark web.
The cyberattack was confirmed by Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, in a federal filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which stated it identified “unauthorized activity within a third-party cloud database environment containing company data.” That third-party database was identified as Snowflake, a cloud storage firm used by several high-profile companies that were involved in other data breaches.
It's unclear if Ticketmaster or its parent company ever notified its customers affected by the data breach, which most states require companies to do by law.
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Now, another hacker group named Sp1d3rHunters, which appears to be associated with ShinyHunters, claimed in an online forum it has barcode data for thousands of printable tickets that it will leak if they aren’t paid a ransom.
According to industry outlets like Infosecurity Magazine and BleepingComputer, the group initially said it had barcode data for 170,000 tickets to Taylor Swift’s "Eras Tour" that it would leak if its demands were not met.
Ticketmaster apparently responded to the threat by claiming its SafeTix technology automatically refreshes barcodes, so efforts to clone them and sell them would be useless. Scripps News has not independently confirmed Ticketmaster’s response.
Sp1d3rHunters hit back, stating in another forum post that the ticket information they allegedly stole was for physical ticket types and therefore they can’t be refreshed. If this is true, Ticketmaster would have to void and reissue all the stolen tickets.
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BleepingComputer said the latest post from the hacking group includes a link to a CSV file containing barcode data for 38,745 TicketFast tickets, which is what Ticketmaster uses to distribute print-at-home event passes. The post also includes a guide for converting the alleged leaked ticket data into a scannable barcode that can be used to create the tickets.
The group claims the data can be used for tickets for events like Cirque du Soleil and concerts from artists like Billy Joel, Carrie Underwood, Dave Matthews Band, P!NK and many more.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have not responded to multiple requests for comment from Scripps News.
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