Ticketmaster Data Breach May Have Compromised 560 Million Customers’ Personal Information

Ticketmaster-Live Nation customers are the latest victims of a notorious hacker group ShinyHunters, who claim to have stolen the personal data of more than half a billion users.

After breaching Ticketmaster’s security system and obtaining 1.3 terabytes of data, which purportedly includes the personal information of more than 560 million customers, ShinyHunters are now attempting to sell the data on the Dark Web for $500,000.

The Ticketmaster data breach allegedly compromised the names, home addresses, emails, phone numbers, ticket purchases, and partial credit card data, such as the last four digits of the card numbers and expiration dates, according to various tech industry news publications.

Same Hackers Behind AT&T Data Breach

ShinyHunters is the same group that claimed responsibility for a recently revealed AT&T data breach, which involved the personal identifying information of more than 70 million customers. While that breach likely happened in 2021, AT&T did not admit that it had occurred until this March, leaving millions of customers scrambling to protect themselves from identify fraud after their personal information had already been released on the Dark Web.

Since the revelation, a growing number of AT&T data breach lawsuits have been filed in courts nationwide, both by individuals who actually experienced identity fraud, and class action complaints by concerned customers.

Ticketmaster, and its parent company, Live Nation, are the latest of at least 60 companies hit by data breaches by ShinyHunters since 2000, according to law enforcement sources, including the FBI.

The data was reportedly posted online on May 28. However, the authenticity of the information being sold has not yet been verified, and neither Ticketmaster nor Live Nation have yet commented on the massive data breach.

It is not the first time Ticketmaster has had trouble with a data breach. In 2020 U.K. authorities fined the company about $1.6 million for a breach in 2018, which affected about 40,000 customers.

AT&T Data Breach Lawsuit MDL Hearing Today

The announcement of this latest data breach occurs as the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) is scheduled to hear oral arguments about whether to consolidate AT&T data breach lawsuits before one federal judge for coordinated pretrial proceedings.

Consolidation of the litigation has been supported by several plaintiffs and the telecom company itself. Given the support of consolidation by several parties on both sides, it is likely that the JPML will hear few, if any, dissenting voices calling for the lawsuits to continue through individual pretrial proceedings.

If the JPML chooses to consolidate the lawsuits before one judge, pretrial proceedings will be coordinated to avoid duplicative discovery into common issues in the cases, and the court will likely establish a bellwether program where a small group of cases will be prioritized, to help gauge how juries may interpret expert testimony and evidence likely to be used in thousands of trials.