Ticketmaster Acknowledges Data Breach After Hacker Claimed Stealing Info From 560 Million Customers
Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation acknowledged that it suffered a data breach tied to the ticketing company’s user data, confirming the matter in an SEC filing Friday.
The filing comes days after a hacker under the name ShinyHunters in a popular online hacker group called Breachforums, claiming that they had pilfered massive amounts of Ticketmaster data including names, addresses, and phone numbers of 560 million customers, as well as some credit card data. ShinyHunters was asking for $500,000 for it.
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Live Nation said in the filing that the company first identified unauthorized activity on the database on May 20 and launched an investigation, further stating that it notified and is cooperating with law enforcement. Despite the hacker claims, Ticketmaster said in the filing that the breach “has not had, and we do not believe it is reasonably likely to have, a material impact on our overall business operations or on our financial condition or results of operations.”
A source with knowledge of the matter says that for now, there’s no evidence of account credentials being compromised.
Per the filing, the breach occurred on “a third-party cloud database environment containing Company data” rather than on Ticketmaster’s servers. Ticketmaster confirmed to Rolling Stone it was a database the company hosted through the cloud data company Snowflake. The SEC filing provided no details on what caused the breach.
When asked for comment, a rep for Snowflake specified that the company has “no evidence suggesting this activity was caused by any vulnerability, misconfiguration, or breach of Snowflake’s product.”
The breach comes as the Department of Justice hit Ticketmaster and Live Nation with a lengthy antitrust lawsuit last week, accusing the company of operating a monopoly over the concert and ticketing industries. Live Nation has issued extensive denials over the DOJ’s allegations, maintaining that the industry is competitive.
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