That's really something. Outsource your client acquisition to your rival, and then steal the clients right before the deal is done? Hopefully some portion of that fine will go to the people harmed...
That's really something. Outsource your client acquisition to your rival, and then steal the clients right before the deal is done? Hopefully some portion of that fine will go to the people harmed by Ticketmaster's actions, but even so, $10 Million is a small price to pay for removing a competitor. Given that Live Nation (the company that owns Ticketmaster) showed $11.5 billion in revenue in 2019, this fine is a drop in the bucket.
We may see jail time potentially. According to the DoJ document [1], both TICKETMASTER L.L.C. and ZEESHAN ZAIDI are listed as defendants in the same criminal case which means Zaidi is still facing...
We may see jail time potentially.
According to the DoJ document [1], both TICKETMASTER L.L.C. and ZEESHAN ZAIDI are listed as defendants in the same criminal case which means Zaidi is still facing individual criminal penalties for his participation that aren't deferred by the $10 million fine. The article also states this:
The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud. According to prosecutors, the former rival employee emailed the login credentials to Zaidi and another Ticketmaster employee.
I can't find anything regarding his sentencing date besides this piece from CNN:
Zaidi was terminated from Ticketmaster in 2017 and pleaded guilty in Brooklyn federal court in 2019 to one count of conspiring to access protected computers without authorization and to commit wire fraud, according to the deferred prosecution agreement. Zaidi's sentencing has been delayed, according to court filings. CNN has contacted his attorneys for comment. [2]
Not sure whether this should be in ~news, ~music, or ~tech. Feel free to move it as appropriate.
Not sure whether this should be in ~news, ~music, or ~tech. Feel free to move it as appropriate.
Ticketmaster has agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine after admitting its employees repeatedly used stolen passwords and other means to hack a rival ticket sales company.
In the settlement, Ticketmaster admitted that an employee who used to work for a rival company emailed the login credentials for multiple accounts the rival used to manage presale ticket sales. At a San Francisco meeting attended by at least 14 employees of Ticketmaster or its parent company Live Nation, the employee used one set of credentials to log in to an account to demonstrate how it worked.
This is a crime, but it also sounds like Songkick had poor security.
This is a crime, but it also sounds like Songkick had poor security.
Besides providing login credentials, the former employee also showed Ticketmaster managers how to exploit a flaw in the URL generation scheme the rival used for unpublished ticketing webpages. To prevent the pages from being accessed by outsiders before they were made public, each one had a unique numerical value. The former employee told his new employer that the values were generated sequentially, and outsiders could use this information to view artist pages while they were still in early draft stages.
That's really something. Outsource your client acquisition to your rival, and then steal the clients right before the deal is done? Hopefully some portion of that fine will go to the people harmed by Ticketmaster's actions, but even so, $10 Million is a small price to pay for removing a competitor. Given that Live Nation (the company that owns Ticketmaster) showed $11.5 billion in revenue in 2019, this fine is a drop in the bucket.
$10M is nothing. There is no meaningful disincentive for this conduct at a fine like that. Someone should be seeing jail time.
We may see jail time potentially.
According to the DoJ document [1], both TICKETMASTER L.L.C. and ZEESHAN ZAIDI are listed as defendants in the same criminal case which means Zaidi is still facing individual criminal penalties for his participation that aren't deferred by the $10 million fine. The article also states this:
I can't find anything regarding his sentencing date besides this piece from CNN:
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/ticketmaster-pays-10-million-criminal-fine-intrusions-competitor-s-computer-systems-0
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/30/business/ticketmaster-plea-passwords-computers/index.html
Not sure whether this should be in ~news, ~music, or ~tech. Feel free to move it as appropriate.
This is a crime, but it also sounds like Songkick had poor security.
Honestly, if they'd figured that out without hiring someone away, they could have done this (comparatively) unnoticed and unpunished.
Yep, that certainly didn't help.