Ticketmaster Was Hacked and Some of Your Personal Information May Have Been Affected

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before, but a major company that deals in online transactions got hacked and as a result, your personal information may be in the wrong hands. It’s an all-too-common number that I’m pretty sure every one of us here have dealt with in the past. Only this time it’s more than half a billion Ticketmaster users that could be up shit’s creek. Isn’t that fun?!

Last night, the major event ticket retailer confirmed that they’d been the target of a cyberattack and subsequent data breach. In an email to users, they revealed that “discovered that an unauthorized third party obtained information from a cloud database hosted by a third-party data services provider…between April 2, 2024 and May 18, 2024.” And while news of the data breach had been made public early last month, what sucks is that users didn’t get notice that their data was affected until very recently.

In a filing with the Maine Attorney General, Ticketmaster claimed that the breach affected more than 1,000 customers. In reality, the breach contained personal details of approximately 560 million customers spanning 1.3 terabytes of stolen data. Ticketmaster claims that in this data breach, the hacking group ShinyHunters gained access to “limited personal information” of people that bought tickets for events in North America. While that sounds like no big deal, it actually could include contact information, credit card information, and other sensitive data.

If you received an email about the breach, then you were likely affected, as Ticketmaster said they only reached out to those that may have been involved.

To try to make things right — and really, how can they at this point — they’re offering a full year of identity monitoring services. Oh and they’re suggesting that anyone potentially affected by the breach immediately report any suspicious activity found in their bank statements or credit card accounts.

So yeah, you might want to check your email and make sure you didn’t get that notice. At this point, it might be wise to just head over to the venue and buy your tickets in person…