Data allegedly belonging to 560 million Ticketmaster customers has been on sale all week, but the company stayed silent until Friday night.
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Someone going by the name “ShinyHunters” has been advertising a 1.3TB cache of data allegedly containing personal data (names, email/home addresses, and phone numbers), credit card details, and other information about 560 million Ticketmaster customers for $500,000 in hacking forums all week.
Now, Ticketmaster parent Live Nation — the company that upset an army of Taylor Swift fans and is facing a federal antitrust lawsuit — publicly acknowledged a data breach in a regulatory filing late Friday evening.
On May 20, 2024, Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (the “Company” or “we”) identified unauthorized activity within a third-party cloud database environment containing Company data (primarily from its Ticketmaster L.L.C. subsidiary) and launched an investigation with industry-leading forensic investigators to understand what happened. On May 27, 2024, a criminal threat actor offered what it alleged to be Company user data for sale via the dark web. 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.
As of the date of this filing, the incident 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. We continue to evaluate the risks and our remediation efforts are ongoing.
The only official statement we’ve seen until now has been from the Australian Department of Home Affairs, which confirmed it was working with the company to understand a cybersecurity incident. As noted above, it says it became aware of unauthorized activity on May 20th — it’s now May 31st. Live Nation has not responded to requests for comment from The Verge.
Live Nation didn’t provide specific details about the breach, how many people are affected, or what it’s doing, but a report by the security firm Hudson Rock claims bad actors breached their Snowflake cloud storage account, as well as those of other companies.
However, Live Nation investors can perhaps feel comforted by executives saying they don’t believe this breach will have a material impact on its overall business, which makes sense if you believe the Department of Justice’s monopoly allegations. With the Live Nation-Ticketmaster conglomerate controlling more than 60 of the top 100 US amphitheaters, where else are people going to go?
