Claude Helped a Hacker Find a Way to Issue Tickets to Almost Every US Music Festival
Security researcher Ian Carroll used the AI model Claude to identify a critical vulnerability in Front Gate Tickets, a subsidiary of Live Nation. The exploit could have allowed unauthorized access to ticketing systems for major US music festivals, though the flaw was patched after being reported.
Why it matters
This incident underscores the dual-use nature of AI, which can be leveraged by researchers to find bugs but also by malicious actors to exploit critical infrastructure.
That was the discovery of security researcher Ian Carroll, who used the AI tool Claude Opus 4.7 in April to discover a technique that allowed him full access to the systems of Front Gate Tickets, which handles ticketing for practically every major US music festival, from Lollapalooza and South by Southwest to Austin City Limits. Carroll found that Front Gate, which like Ticketmaster is a subsidiary of the event company Live Nation Entertainment, had a bug in its website that he—with Claude’s help—could exploit to gain access to millions of customer or staff records and freely issue tickets for any event, of any value, to himself or whoever he chose.
The report focuses on technical facts and the security implications of AI without taking a partisan stance.
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