A hacker has claimed to have stolen the data of 560 million Ticketmaster customers, which could impact up to five million Australians who have a Ticketmaster account.
Lead image by Gorodenkoff.
The global data breach, which was revealed in a post by the hacker group ShinyHunters, claims to have 1.3 terabytes of data from Ticketmaster and Live Nation customers and is planning to sell it for US$500 million.
Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation operate in 35 countries. Although it is not yet known if the data of Australians is caught up in the cyber attack, it is conceivable given the scale of the data breach.
The businesses are currently being sued by the US Justice Department in an effort to break up their control of the live events and ticketing market, where in some markets they have a substantial share of the sector.
Yesterday, Australia’s Home Affairs Department confirmed that they were aware of the attack and are working with Ticketmaster to clarify the extent of it. The department directed concerned customers to ask Ticketmaster for furhter details.
Nigel Phair, a professor in Monash University’s Department of Software Systems & Cybersecurity, said companies aren’t investing enough to protect consumer’s data.
“Significant data breaches are becoming all too common. The current legislative approach is clearly not working, as organisations are still not putting sufficient effort into cyber risk management,” he said.
“There are over five million Australian and New Zealand Ticketmaster account holders, they will be concerned about any loss of personal information, including names, addresses, passwords, credit card numbers, etc. and where this may end up on the Dark Web.
“It is troubling that Ticketmaster has not made any public statements regarding this data breach. Organisations need to be more proactive in their communications and inform the public what has happened and how they are remediating the situation.”
The damage caused by large data breaches can be substantial. A new study by Honeycomb Strategy revealed that nearly half of Optus and Medibank customers had either switched to competitors or were planning to in the wake of large scale data breaches at the telco and insurance firm.
