Ticketmaster was reportedly informed of the huge data breach that took place earlier this week back in April, according to UK digital bank Monzo.
Monzo’s said in a statement that its Financial Crime team began to notice a pattern of fraudulent transactions on cards that had been previously used at Ticketmaster in early April. Out of 50 fraud reports the bank received that day, 70 per cent of cards had made transactions on Ticketmaster in the last several months.
“This seemed unusual, as overall only 0.8 per cent of all our customers had used Ticketmaster,” said Natasha Vernier, head of Financial Crime at Monzo, in the statement.
On April 12, Monzo claims to have voiced its concerns directly to Ticketmaster and that the company said it would “investigate internally.”
In the week to follow, Monzo reportedly received several more Ticketmaster fraud alerts and replaced roughly 6,000 compromised cards over the course of April 19 and 20, without mentioning Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster told Monzo in April that it had completed its internal investigation and it had shown no evidence of a breach.
Up to 40,000 UK Ticketmaster customers could have had “some personal or payment information” stolen following a data security breach at the ticketing giant.
Ticketmaster admitted it had been hacked by “malicious software” on third-party customer support product Inbenta Technologies.
Ticketmaster said the breach was likely to have only affected UK customers who purchased or attempted to purchase tickets between February and June 23, 2018.
“Some personal or payment information may have been accessed by an unknown third party”, Ticketmaster said in a statement.
All affected customers have been contacted, and the ticketing giant set up a website for those whose personal information may have been compromised in the incident. The website has been created in an effort to answer any questions and advise users to reset their passwords immediately.
Ticketmaster has since announced that the breach can be traced back to an AI chat bot it uses to help answer customers’ questions when a live staff member is unavailable. The software’s designer, Inbenta, confirmed that the malware had taken advantage of one piece of JavaScript that was written specially for Ticketmaster’s use of the chat bot, TechCrunch reports.
Image: Soumil Koumar