Reverse-Engineering Ticketmaster’s Barcode System

Interesting: By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removin...

Ticketmaster says stolen Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets are useless

While cybercriminals are offering free tickets to Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other events, Ticketmaster is telling would-be purchasers that these tickets will prove to be worthless. Those who have claimed responsibility for the Ticketmaster data breach say they’ve stolen 440,000 tickets for Taylo...

Stop Scrapers and Scalpers with Akamai Content Protector

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Scalpers, and their bot armies, swing in to net web-based Spiderman tickets

29 November 2021 was “Spider Monday” and tickets for Marvel’s film Spider-Man: No Way Home went on sale with the sort of marketing fervor for which Disney and the Marvel Cinematic Universe MCU are famous. As tickets to one of the most eagerly anticipated Christmas films featuring one of the most...

How to build a password cracking rig during a worldwide chip shortage

… and keep a domain password auditing service online. Making money on GPUs, the hard way… At PTP we had a fairly decent GPU password cracking box called Titan. It used 4×1080 GPUs and had an NTLM hash rate of around 180GH/s. Several years ago I realised that the box was sitting idle much of the...

Supporting COVID-19 Vaccine Rollouts with Vaccine Edge

Global efforts to produce and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine continue to race ahead. But in many cases, that race is an uphill climb. Beyond the challenges in making enough of the vaccine, educating the public, and the logistics of distributing the doses, there is a new challenge. Bots. In recen...

How Grinch Buying Bots Took the Gaming Hardware Market Hostage

In video games jargon, the phrase “Console Wars" refers to the fierce competition between hardware manufacturers for market share. It turns out, however, that the only war going on at the moment is for acquiring a console. And thus far, Grinch Bots are winning. Video Games’ Popularity Is Peaking...

The FTC Cracks Down on Bot-Wielding Ticket Scalpers

Plus: A security company creeper, Biden’s cyberteam, and the rest of this week’s security news...