Well, finally someone pays for doing harm. I believe this article was supposed to say ticketmaster, but it is ticketmaster. Turns out, they were able to obtain passwords and other stuff to look at what their rivals were up to, so they can have an upper edge.
Does a 10 million dollar fine cover the overall cost of the rival company going after them to determine what was going on? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.
To make things interesting, a paragraph of the article says:
The rival company didn’t know that one of its former employees had leaked logins to Ticketmaster, which used them to gather information in the mid-2010s
about the competitor’s technology and other aspects of its business.
While the feds didn’t name the company, this article claims that it is a company I don’t think I’ve heard of called Songkick. This is a New York Times article on Songkick which is linked within the article I’ll be linking.
“Ticketmaster used stolen information to gain an advantage over its competition, and then promoted the employees who broke the law. This investigation
is a perfect example of why these laws exist — to protect consumers from being cheated in what should be a fair market place,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge
William F. Sweeney Jr.The $10 million fine against Ticketmaster — a wholly owned subsidiary of entertainment giant Live Nation — settles five criminal charges for illegal computer
access and fraud. In a related case in October, Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s Artist Services division, pleaded guilty to charges of
conspiring to commit computer intrusions and wire fraud.Under the deal with the feds, Ticketmaster also must maintain a compliance and ethics program “designed to prevent and detect violations of the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act and other applicable laws, and to prevent the unauthorized and unlawful acquisition of confidential information belonging to its competitors.”
This is quite interesting and when I read that, I just had to shake my head. This was quite an interesting article and lots of things are linked within it.
Tickemaster pays $10M fine to settle charges of using stolen passwords to spy on rival company is the article, and I hope that this is a lesson to others, the feds are waiting.