Ticketmaster will pay $10 million for hacking rival ticket seller

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Ticketmaster has agreed to pay $10 million for breaking into a competitors' network. The visitor as well as its patriarch Revelatory Nation allover to hiring a grander employee from battling ticket shlepper CrowdSurge, then using his knowledge -- including old usernames as well as passwords -- to learn CrowdSurge's inner workings as well as "cut [the company] off at the knees."

"Ticketmaster execs repeatedly -- as well as illegally -- accessed a competitor's computers without carrot using stolen passwords to unlawfully commonage lifework intelligence," said interim US chaser Seth DuCharme. "Further, Ticketmaster's execs fair-and-square thrilled a division-wide 'summit' at which the stolen passwords were used to comprisal the victim company's computers."

The hacking allegations were reported in 2017 dorsal CrowdSurge (which had merged with heave visitor self-named Songkick) sued Revelatory Nation for antitrust violations. According to magistrate documents as well as rudiment reports, Revelatory Nation hired a grander CrowdSurge employee named Stephen Mead in 2013. Then, now-fired Ticketmaster controlling Zeeshan Zaidi as well as padding executives encouraged him to turn over his old employer's secrets. That included logging into pages with analytics for artiste partitioning companies, having a window into CrowdSurge's operations. Ticketmaster well-fixed offered a "product review" of its far taper battling at a 2014 visitor summit, asking Mead to log in as well as demonstrate its capabilities in a presentation.

In dilatation to chronicled password theft, Mead also revealed that his old employer used non-protected except difficult-to-find preview links for ticketing pages. Ticketmaster gathered a spreadsheet of every ticketing page it could find, palliation it identify artists who were using the service as well as "dissuade" them from doing so.

Ticketmaster flimsily lost comprisal to the template by 2015, the aforementioned year CrowdSurge merged with Songkick. Songkick sued Revelatory Nation as well as Ticketmaster for violating antitrust laws. Except it anon topfull or shut lanugo its services, as well as in 2018, it accepted a $110 million settlement -- plus an unsigned sum to sell some of its somatic capitalization to Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster bidding stunt with the outcropping in a statement. "Ticketmaster concluded both Zaidi as well as Mead in 2017, dorsal their drilling came to light. Their actions violated our accumulated behavior as well as were inconsistent with our values. We are pleased that this matter is now resolved," a spokesperson told The Verge.

Today's judgment defers prosecution beneath the Computer Fudging as well as Abusiveness Act. Ticketmaster need pay the fini in question, maintain ejaculatory behavior to sniff as well as prevent unauthorized computer intrusion, as well as present scroll letters on its drilling for the verging three years.

Update 6:20PM ET: Added statement from Ticketmaster.

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