A group of hackers by the name of ShinyHunters have claimed to have got access to personal information about more than half a billion ticket-buyers after hacking the Ticketmaster platform.
According to cybersecurity news site Hackread, hackers stole 1.3TB of Ticketmaster data after hacking the servers of the Live Nation owned ticketing company, accessing the names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, order information and partial payment card data of around 560 million customers. The payment data includes the last four digits of card numbers and expiry dates.
The ShinyHunters group, Hackread explains, is “known for its high-profile data breaches” and has managed to beat recent efforts by the FBI to shut down its operations. That included reclaiming a seized domain, a move which demonstrated the group’s “technical prowess and resilience against law enforcement actions”.
If the claims being made are true, data protection regulators across the world will take an interest. In Australia, the Department Of Home Affairs has already confirmed to media that it is aware of a “cyber incident” impacting Ticketmaster customers, with a spokesperson telling ABC that they are now “working with Ticketmaster to understand the incident”.
Live Nation is already facing significant political and regulator scrutiny in the US, currently over allegations of anticompetitive conduct, with the country's Department Of Justice filing a lawsuit last week demanding that the live giant be forced to sell its ticketing company. Some politicians in Congress have also been raising concerns about Live Nation’s market dominance and a major data breach will only add to the criticism being made in Washington.
The alleged hack will also be of interest to data protection authorities in the UK, where in 2020 the Information Commissioner’s Office fined the ticketing company £1.25 million following a much smaller data breach in 2018 that affected about 40,000 customers.