Private information of half a billion Ticketmaster customers for sale

Hackers collective ShinyHunters says it’s selling the personal details of 560 million Ticketmaster customers for 500,000 dollars on the dark web. Parent company Live Nation hasn’t responded to inquiries of the media.

Researchers from vx-underground say that ‘an unidentified threat group’ was able to gain access to Ticketmaster AWS instances ‘sometime in April’ by pivoting from a managed service provider (MSP) that provides IT services for the company.

The analysts spoke to multiple well-informed individuals with knowledge of the data breach and got their hands on a large data sample. With a high degree of confidence, they think the data is legitimate. The database goes back to 2011 and includes full names, physical addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, hashed credit card numbers, order details and financial transactions.

“The data provided to us, even as a ‘sample’, was absurdly large and made it difficult to review in depth. We are unable to verify the authenticity of financial information,” vx-underground warns.

‘Data breach could be a hoax’

ShinyHunters did not execute the Ticketmaster data breach: the group simply acted as a proxy and posted the data auction on the dark web by rebooting the illicit marketplace BreachForums, which had been seized by the FBI earlier this month.

According to ShinyHunters, the entire Ticketmaster database contains detailed information of more than 560 million customers and is 1.3 terabytes in size. Asking price is set at 500,000 million dollars.

Brett Callow, a cybersecurity analyst at Emsisoft, told The Guardian the breach could be genuine, but could also be a hoax to gain attention and resurrect BreachForums.

Neither Ticketmaster nor parent company Live Nation has confirmed that a data breach took place. So far they haven’t answered any questions from the media about the incident.

A spokesperson from the Australian Department of Home Affairs told ABC it’s working with Ticketmaster “to understand the incident”. A spokesperson from the US embassy told news agency AFP that the FBI has offered to help the Australian authorities.