Industry News

Ticketfly services back online after cyber-attack

Some of Ticketfly’s services are up and running again following last week’s cyber-attack that forced the firm to remain offline for more than four days, affecting millions of customers and thousands of venues and events operators.

While Ticketfly.com is still down, the company said Ticketfly Backstage, which includes Box Office, Emailer, reporting, scanning, printing, and ticket purchasing, is back online. It also added that the Pulse app is up and running.

“In consultation with leading third-party forensic and cybersecurity experts, we are in the process of bringing the Ticketfly ticketing system back online with the security of our clients and fans top of mind,” a Ticketfly spokesperson told Billboard in a statement.

“We are grateful for the outpouring of support our community has shown us while we continue to work through this cyber incident.”

Ticketfly stated on its website that the recovery could involve some glitches, and that they “expect there will be some technical issues with certain functionality typical to bringing these types of operations back online.”

Ticketfly, which Eventbrite bought from Pandora in a $200m deal last September, took its platform down on May 31 after apparently being infected by an attack and ransom demand from a hacker calling themselves Ishakdz. Initially a message saying “Your Security Down im (sic) Not Sorry” appeared on Ticketfly’s homepage.

The ticketing company confirmed that customers’ names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers had been exposed and posted online after a ransom was reportedly not paid. The hacker is alleged to have demanded a single bitcoin ($7,500 at the time) to divulge the vulnerability that left Ticketfly open to attack.

However, credit card numbers and passwords were apparently not affected.

“Have I Been Pwned?” (POHNED), a website that tracks data breaches, says the hack affected more than 26 million user accounts.