Australia negotiates with Ticketmaster over hacking ‘incident’ | National

The group, called ShinyHunters, explained in an online forum that the stolen data included names, addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, credit card details of customers.

The data was available as part of a “one-time sale” for $500,000, the post said.

“The National Office of Cyber ​​​​Security is working with Ticketmaster to understand the incident,” an Australian government spokesperson said in a statement.

Those with “specific requests” are encouraged to contact Ticketmaster directly.

The FBI has offered assistance to Australian authorities, a US embassy spokesman told AFP.

ShinyHunters gained notoriety in 2020 and 2021 when the company released massive amounts of customer data from more than 60 companies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In January, a Seattle court sentenced French computer hacker Sebastien Raoult, a member of ShinyHunters, to prison.

He was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay over $5 million in restitution after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

US prosecutors said the extensive hacking attacks caused millions of dollars in damages to the companies affected and “immeasurable additional harm” to hundreds of millions of people whose data was sold to other criminals.

AFP has contacted Ticketmaster for comment. The authenticity of the dataset offered by ShinyHunters could not be immediately verified.

– Hacking will increase –

Hacker attacks are affecting more and more people and have increasingly serious consequences, Katina Michael, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Wollongong, told AFP.

The number of hacked people “will increase, it could be up to a billion in the future,” she said.

Governments, businesses and consumers are not doing enough to protect themselves and are not investing enough in basic protections like two-factor authentication, Michael warned.

Ticketmaster, a California-based company, operates one of the largest online ticket sales platforms in the world.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a major antitrust lawsuit last week to break Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s alleged monopoly in the music industry.

Ticketmaster’s pricing policy, with its high fees and lack of alternatives, has long been a political issue in the US. In the past, little has been done to open the market to more competition.

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