Hacker threatens to leak ticket information for thousands of Swifties

The threat actor known as Sp1d3rHunters claims to have stolen ticket data for over 166,000 Taylor Swift fans. He’s demanding 2 million dollars from Ticketmaster.

Last May, hacking group ShinyHunters posted a message on the dark web, saying it acted as a proxy for a third-party to sell the personal details of 560 million Ticketmaster customers.

Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, acknowledged the data breach. The database was hosted on Snowflake servers. The Boston-based cloud storage service provider fell victim to a hacking group in April that downloaded databases of at least 165 businesses and organizations.

A few companies that were affected by the security incident at Snowflake are luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, automotive auto parts provider Advanced Auto Parts and Spain’s largest bank Santander.

“To date, we do not believe this activity is caused by any vulnerability, misconfiguration, or malicious activity within the Snowflake product. Throughout the course of our ongoing investigation, we have promptly informed the limited number of customers who we believe may have been impacted,” a Snowflake spokesperson said in a statement.

Stolen barcodes cannot be used

A threat actor called Sp1d3rHunters, previously known as Sp1d3r, claims to have ticket data for over 166,000 Taylor Swift Eras Tour barcodes. The dataset contains information like names, valid barcodes, seat information, value of the tickets and other personal details.

“Pay us $2 million USD or we leak all 680M of your users information and 30 million more event barcodes including: more Taylor Swift events, P!nk, Sting, Sporting events F1 Formula Racing, MLB, NFL and thousands more events,” the hacker threatens.

A spokesperson from Ticketmaster told Recorded Future News that the barcodes it uses are unique and cannot be used.

“Ticketmaster’s SafeTix technology protects tickets by automatically refreshing a new and unique barcode every few seconds so it cannot be stolen or copied. This is just one of many fraud protections we implement to keep tickets safe and secure,” he said.

Furthermore, he also confirms that Ticketmaster isn’t negotiating with the threat actor about ransom demands.