Ticketmaster Claims Bot Attack Disrupted Taylor Swift Tour Sales

Ticketmaster has claimed they had been hit by a cyber-attack in November 2022 that led to in depth issues with ticket profits for Taylor Swift’s US tour.

Joe Berchtold, president of Reside Nation, Ticketmaster’s dad or mum organization, manufactured the revelations at a US congressional committee Tuesday.

“We were […] hit with 3 situations the total of bot traffic than we experienced at any time experienced, and for the initially time in 400 Confirmed Enthusiast on income, they came soon after our Confirmed Lover obtain code servers,” Berchtold claimed.

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“When the bots unsuccessful to penetrate our programs or get any tickets, the attack needed us to slow down and even pause our product sales. This is what led to a horrible shopper experience that we deeply regret.”

At the listening to, senator Amy Klobuchar, who chairs the US Senate committee on purchaser legal rights, explained that the “high costs, site disruptions and cancellations that prospects knowledgeable shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant marketplace situation implies the firm does not encounter any pressure to constantly innovate and strengthen.”

Berchtold acknowledged the organization ought to have carried out much better, saying Ticketmaster could have prolonged the sales “about a longer time period of time” to prevent the procedure overload and that it ought to have completed “a greater task environment fan expectations for finding tickets.”

Alexander Heid, chief research and advancement officer at SecurityScorecard, agrees that Ticketmaster seems to have endured from a bot-driven attack.

“The availability issues claimed by Ticketmaster to have happened for the duration of the sale of Taylor Swift tickets [were] a end result of bots attempting to obtain tickets for resale the superior volume of requests resulted in a DDoS-like affliction whereby floods of artificial visitors triggered slowdowns and outages for the duration of a flash revenue function,” Heid instructed Infosecurity in an email.

In accordance to the security skilled, when it is tough to mitigate floods of sudden targeted traffic, preparations can be set into position to scale with the website traffic if it is anticipated.

“[With] methods these kinds of as applying bot filtering based on IP tackle standing, consumer-agents can mitigate some of the ‘junk traffic’ – but subtle functions will make use of bots that use household IPs and valid consumer-agents – having load balancing and CDN configurations executed will go a lengthy way to guarantee that prospects are continually capable to perform transactions.”

The congressional committee listening to comes months immediately after Ticketmaster rival See Tickets notified buyers of a sizeable breach of their personalized and economic information.