Alongside surprise fees and high costs on the resale market, add ‘having your data compromised’ to the list of reasons why buying concert tickets sucks these days.
What happened: Ticketmaster told Canadian customers that their data, including encrypted credit card numbers, may have been compromised in a breach it’s known about for over a month now. But hey, at least the company’s offering users a free year of identity monitoring.
- Initial reports claimed that ~560 million users could be affected, though the company said more recently the number is likely closer to 1,000.
Catch-up: Ticketmaster is just one company affected in what could be one of the largest data leaks ever. In April and May, data from accounts belonging to as many as 165 companies using cloud service provider Snowflake were leaked to the dark web for sale.
- While Snowflake’s platform wasn’t compromised, hackers reportedly used stolen credentials to log into accounts that used single-factor authentication, meaning they only needed a password and username. This week, Snowflake made multifactor authentication the default.
Why it matters: As cybercrime continues to rise, an incident like this raises concerns about third-party cloud providers that each possess access to the data for many companies.—QH