After reportedly being attacked by a hacker late last week, the ticketing company Ticketfly has taken its system offline while it sorts out what it terms “a recent cyber incident.”
The company, which Eventbrite bought from Pandora last year, operates ticketing for entertainment venues nationwide, with its Athens clients including the Georgia Theatre and 40 Watt Club. The former club’s website was back up Monday at a temporary address, though online ticketing remains unavailable.
The 40 Watt’s website was still down Monday morning, with visitors being greeted by the following statement:
We’re working to bring ticketfly.com back up as soon as possible. In the meantime, we encourage you to keep checking in on your favorite venue/promoters’ websites, social media channels, or box offices. Shows are on and tickets are available online and onsite.
As MarketWatch reports, the Ticketfly hack may have exposed sensitive data that could affect more than 26 millon of its users, including names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers. The company says payment information and passwords were not stolen.
Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, who claims to have communicated with the hacker, writes, “The hacker told Motherboard that they reached out to Ticketfly before the breach, alerting the company of a vulnerability, and demanding a ransom of 1 bitcoin to help them fix the flaw. After the company did not respond to their emails, the hacker defaced the site.”
Local venue employees say the impact to business has thankfully been minimal. Drew Beskin, general manager of the Georgia Theatre, says, “Other venues over the country had it way worse than us based on the timing of the hack… It was a pretty scary thing, but we made it through and [are] now slowly rebuilding our website.” 40 Watt Club talent buyer Velena Vego says she is urging customers to “please be patient.”
Ticketfly posted Monday that it was working on getting its system back up and running, adding, as a caveat, “As things come back online we expect there will be some technical issues with certain functionality typical to bringing these types of operations back online. Thank you for your patience.”
UPDATE: The 40 Watt site is back up as of Monday afternoon.
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