A former boss of Ticketmaster has been sentenced after pleading responsible to illegally accessing pc servers of a rival firm and stealing delicate enterprise data.
In 2012, Stephen Mead left ticket firm CrowdSurge, signing a $52,970 separation settlement promising to not maintain or disclose confidential data from his former employer, comparable to shopper lists, passwords, advertising and marketing methods, and monetary knowledge.
Nevertheless, after later becoming a member of Ticketmaster, Mead shared usernames and passwords together with his new colleagues which enabled them to illegally entry CrowdSurge’s community and delicate enterprise data.
In accordance with the Division of Justice, Mead instructed his co-workers to “screen-grab the hell out of the system” however cautioned, “I need to stress that as that is entry to a dwell device I’d watch out in what you click on on as it will be finest not [to] giveaway that we’re snooping round.”
In a very audacious transfer, at an Artist Providers Summit in San Francisco, Mead openly accessed a password-protected space of Crowdsurge’s techniques utilizing stolen credentials throughout a presentation. The unlawful entry was projected on a convention room’s display in entrance of a minimum of 14 Dwell Nation and Ticketmaster staff.
CrowdSurge solely found that Mead was hacking its techniques after a former Ticketmaster govt got here to work for the corporate in 2015, and suggested them to assessment their safety.
Crowdsurge merged with live performance ticket agency Songkick in 2015, and in 2018 Dwell Nation – the guardian firm of Ticketmaster – agreed to amass Songkick’s guardian firm as a part of a $110 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit that alleged Ticketmaster had “tried to destroy competitors within the artist pre-sale ticketing providers market in a variety of alternative ways”.
Ticketmaster was finally fined US $10 million for repeatedly accessing its competitor’s pc techniques.
British-born Mead had misplaced his job at Dwell Nation and Ticketmaster in late 2017, and returned to the UK. Earlier this 12 months he was arrested in Italy and extradited to america.
After coming into a responsible plea to prices earlier this 12 months, Mead has now been ordered to pay $67,970 in forfeiture, and sentenced to 1 12 months’s supervised launch.
One other former Ticketmaster govt, Zeeshan Zaidi, had additionally pleaded responsible to prices associated to the hacking of CrowdSurge, however is but to be sentenced.
Keep in mind, your staff typically have privileged entry to delicate firm data and knowledge.
You can’t simply depend on confidentiality agreements to guard what you are promoting after staff depart a enterprise. It’s essential to implement strong safety practices, together with necessary password modifications upon termination, to cut back the chance of knowledge breaches and unauthorised entry.