The ShinyHunters, a notorious group of cyber criminals and founders of the criminal marketplace BrachForums, stole Ticketmaster customer data in April 2024. The data breach was confirmed directly by Ticketmaster and Snowflake, the company that provides cloud-based data warehousing services.
All organizations using Snowflake services worldwide were affected. ShinyHunters stole organizations’ credentials through information theft malware. In May 2024, the cybercriminal group put up for sale the data of 500 million Ticketmaster customers for $500,000. Additionally, ShinyHunters blackmailed other impacted companies to prevent the disclosure of stolen data.
Behind the threat of previous extortion attempts, there is a hacker group called Sp1d3r. They demanded a ransom of $2 million from Ticketmaster to avoid disclosing 680 million stolen records, including 30 million ticket barcodes from events like Taylor Swift Eras Tour. Ticketmaster assured its customers that the stolen ticket barcodes cannot be used due to the SafeTix technology, which updates the barcodes every few seconds.
