Remember the massive Ticketmaster hack earlier this year? Well, it turns out that this breach was bigger than first thought. As in, “440,000 tickets compromised for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour alone” big.
Cybersecurity publication Hackread reports that hacker group ShinyHunters updated their ransom demand on Thursday, asking Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation Entertainment to pay $8 million for the safe return of the information. Although ShinyHunters claimed to have previously accepted a “rushed” offer of $1 million from Live Nation, the group has since evaluated the hacked data and revised its demands. Apparently, ShinyHunters concluded that the data is significantly more valuable than they first believed.
Ticketmaster confirms massive hack. What you need to know.
“[W]I figured out how to make the road more expensive and the insurance probably accepts that; we resume negotiations at $8 million, notify the negotiator and insurance,” read a post by ShinyHunters (via a photo from Hackread), published on the infamous hacking forum Breach Forums.
According to ShinyHunters, the group received a total of 193 million ticket barcodes, worth over $22.6 billion in total. That includes 440,000 tickets for Taylor Swift’s ongoing Eras tour, as well as another 30 million for 65,000 other events.
It’s unclear exactly when Live Nation allegedly offered to pay the $1 million reward, or if it happened at all. ShinyHunters first tried to sell the data for $500,000 in late May, when the Ticketmaster breach was first reported. At the time, 1.3 terabytes were believed to contain sensitive information belonging to 560 million Ticketmaster customers. This included users’ full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, their ticket purchase history and details, and even partial payment details such as credit card expiry dates.
ShinyHunters latest announcement has now provided further details on the breach, stating that the hacked information includes 400 million encrypted credit cards, 440 million unique email addresses and 680 million order details. The hacker group claims this makes it “the largest publicly disclosed client breach. [personally identifiable information] of all time.”
Mashable’s Speed of Light
Mashable has reached out to Live Nation for comment.
Ongoing ticketing issues
Ticketmaster has had it tough lately, even beyond the universal hate it usually gets. Last year the company was the subject of a US Senate hearing investigating the apparent lack of competition in the live music industry. The US Department of Justice later filed a lawsuit seeking to take down Live Nation this May, accusing it of violating antitrust laws. According to the complaint, over 70 percent of tickets sold or resold for major US concert venues in 2022 were handled by Ticketmaster.
For its part, Live Nation has denied that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, claiming in a previous statement to Mashable that “competition has steadily eroded Ticketmaster’s market share and profit margin.” Of course, decreasing market share does not prevent a company from also having a monopoly, especially if it starts from a dominant position of 70 percent.
This isn’t the first time Ticketmaster has run afoul of Taylor Swift fans, either. The 2022 presale for Swift’s Eras tour was a notorious fiasco, with Ticketmaster subsequently canceling public ticket sales due to “insufficient remaining ticket inventory.” The company issued an official apology, though that didn’t prevent a subsequent lawsuit from disgruntled Swifties. Disgruntled fans accused Ticketmaster of operating an “anti-competitive scheme,” defrauding fans by failing to disclose that it had sent out more presale codes than it could serve with tickets.
Swift released an official statement following the Eras Tour ticket controversy, expressing her disappointment and revealing that Ticketmaster had assured her team that it could handle the demand after they had asked her about it several times.
“It’s really amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that so many of them feel like they’ve gone through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift wrote.
Unfortunately, it looks like the headaches aren’t over yet for at least 440,000 of those Swifties.