The worlds of CyberSecurity & Swifties meet

Swiftie in Chief and CEO of HighGround.io Mark Lamb had this to say to Hack Read about the Ticketmaster bot-driven attack .

‘Public events that attract a wide audience will always prompt a surge in cybercrime,’ says  Mark Lamb, CEO of HighGround.io, after a bot attack prevented thousands of Taylor Swift fans buying tickets.

Ticketmaster usually controls bot issues using a pre-registration system, but was overwhelmed with ‘three times the amount of bot traffic … we had ever experienced’, the company announced in a statement about the November 2022 attack.

Lamb says, ‘Ticketmaster appears to have suffered from a bot-driven attack where a malicious threat actor used automated attack tools to overflow the website with traffic, with the intention of taking systems offline and disrupting purchases.

‘Event sites must use the incident as a reminder of the importance of focusing on network resilience before ticket sales go live, particularly when events are going to attract a high volume of purchasers. Bot mitigation tools and DDoS protections are two critical elements of this resilience.’

Why not tune in to our panel discussion next Wednesday: ‘Who would win in a technology smackdown – the IT or cyber department?’ at Barcelona Cyber Security Congress 2023