Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, have agreed to pay out $ 10 million dollars to a competitor after admitting to hiring a former employee to hack the rival company’s computer network.
According to a statement from the Justice Department on Wednesday, the five criminals face Ticketmaster emerged from a plot to infiltrate the computer system of ticket seller rival CrowdSurge in a self-proclaimed attempt to [the company] on the knees. “
“Ticketmaster employees have repeatedly – and illegally – accessed a competitor’s computers without permission using stolen passwords to unlawfully collect company information,” acting US attorney Seth DuCharme said in the statement. “Furthermore, Ticketmaster employees brutally held a division-wide ‘summit’ where the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company’s computers.”
The hacking plan was first reported in 2017, shortly after CrowdSurge filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation. At some point prior to that filing, Live Nation had apparently recruited an employee named Stephen Mead, who stole the company from CrowdSurge in 2013, to turn against his former employer and offer data analytics and insider secrets to top executives in an effort to stumble the competitor.
Mead’s knowledge of his former employer’s passwords was so extensive that it allowed him to log into the company’s backend at a Live Nation summit in 2014, where he reportedly offered executives a ‘product review’ of the operations from CrowdSurge and led a demonstration of the internal systems.
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In a statement to The edgeA Ticketmaster spokesperson said the company was satisfied with the terms of the settlement, emphasizing that both Mead and Zeeshan Zaidi – Ticketmaster’s former general manager for artist services – had both been terminated as a result of an investigation into the abuses.
Ticketmaster terminated both Zaidi and Mead in 2017, after their behavior came to light, the spokesman said. “Their actions were against our company policy and our values. We are pleased that this issue has now been resolved. “