Ticketmaster agreed to pay $ 10 million to join a competitor’s network. The company and its parent company Live Nation admitted to hiring a former employee of rival ticket vendor CrowdSurge, then using their knowledge – including old usernames and passwords – to learn the inner workings of CrowdSurge and “hack [the company] on your knees. “
“Ticketmaster employees repeatedly – and illegally – accessed an unauthorized competitor’s computers using stolen passwords to collect business information illegally,” said acting US attorney Seth DuCharme. “In addition, Ticketmaster employees brazenly held a ‘dome’ across the division, in which stolen passwords were used to access the victim company’s computers.”
The hacking allegations were reported in 2017 after CrowdSurge (which had merged with another company called Songkick) sued Live Nation for antitrust violations. According to court documents and previous reports, Live Nation hired a former CrowdSurge employee named Stephen Mead in 2013. Then, now fired Ticketmaster executive Zeeshan Zaidi and other executives encouraged him to reveal the secrets of his former employer. This included logging in to pages with reviews for artist management companies, providing a window into CrowdSurge’s operations. Ticketmaster even offered a much smaller “product review” of its rival at a company summit in 2014, asking Mead to log in and demonstrate its features in a presentation.
In addition to the actual password theft, Mead also revealed that his former employer used unprotected but hard-to-find preview links for ticket pages. Ticketmaster put together a spreadsheet for each page of tickets it could find, allowing it to identify the artists who were using the service and “dissuade” them from doing so.
Ticketmaster apparently lost access to the system in 2015, the same year that CrowdSurge merged with Songkick. Songkick sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for violating antitrust laws. But it soon sold or terminated its services and, in 2018, accepted a $ 110 million deal – another undisclosed sum to sell some of its remaining assets to Ticketmaster.
Today’s trial postpones the process under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Ticketmaster must pay the fine in question, maintain clear policies to detect and prevent unauthorized computer intrusions and submit annual reports on its conduct over the next three years.