An “unauthorized activity” was discovered by the concert promoter on May 20th which used a third-party cloud database that collects Ticketmaster data.
The group of cyber hackers called ShinyHunters was said to have illegally gathered over 560 million customer details from names, credit cards, addresses, and phone numbers. Moreover, the group demanded a $500,000 ransom payment from Live Nation to ward them off from selling data to other parties.
A filing was made by the entertainment company to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on May 27th. According to them, “a criminal threat actor offered what it alleged to be Company user data for sale via the dark web,” and added that they were investigating.
“We are working to mitigate risk to our users and the company, and have notified and are cooperating with law enforcement. As appropriate, we are also notifying regulatory authorities and users with respect to unauthorized access to personal information. We continue to evaluate the risks and our remediation efforts are ongoing,” the firm declared.
Researchers provided caution as they think it is part of a larger hacking operation from a cloud service provider named Snowflake, which is used by many large firms to store data. The same hacking group ShinyHunters was gaining to sell confidential information of a financial institution called Santander and has reportedly lost 30 million customer data.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010, are facing legal action over competition concerns.
The US government accused them of running an illegal monopoly all over live events in America. They are also facing a ‘landmark consumer class action lawsuit’ which demands $5bn to compensate the potential millions of ticket purchasers.
A US attorney and general Merrick Garland said, “It is time to restore competition and innovation in the entertainment industry. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
A user on X (formerly known as Twitter) mentioned Ticketmaster’s capability to pay for the ransom because of how high they charge for the fees.
ticketmaster can easily pay the ransom with all those fuckin fees they charge, and if they don’t:pic.twitter.com/KJSaqA4RRG https://t.co/XwMHmA1t5L
— karl (@sindelscorpio) June 1, 2024
Another user ratted out why they heard the news of data breach from X rather than being sent out emails ensuring their security.
now hold on why did ticketmaster not send an email or something out to all of their users to inform about this why am i hearing about it from pop base on twitter dot com 🧍🏻 https://t.co/QarsMNh3RZ
— mads 💫🇵🇸 (@jimsrippedshirt) June 1, 2024
The Australian government as well as the FBI have volunteered their help to resolve the cyber-attack.
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