"Ticketmaster Claims Bot Attack Disrupted Taylor Swift Tour Sales"

Ticketmaster has recently claimed they were hit by a cyberattack in November 2022 that led to extensive issues with ticket sales for Taylor Swift's US tour.  The company noted that they were hit with three times the amount of bot traffic than they had ever experienced, and for the first time in 400 Verified Fan on sales, they came after their Verified Fan access code servers.  The company stated that while the bots failed to penetrate its systems or acquire any tickets, the attack required them to slow down and even pause its sales.  This is what led to the terrible consumer experience.  Alexander Heid, chief research and development officer at SecurityScorecard, agrees that Ticketmaster appears to have suffered from a bot-driven attack.  Heid stated that the availability issues reported by Ticketmaster to have occurred during the sale of Taylor Swift tickets were a result of bots attempting to acquire tickets for resale; the high volume of requests resulted in a DDoS-like condition whereby floods of artificial traffic caused slowdowns and outages during a flash sales event.  

Infosecurity reports: "Ticketmaster Claims Bot Attack Disrupted Taylor Swift Tour Sales"