Technology allows us to communicate and share things with people all over the world which is a great power to have. Along with so many positives technology can bring, it also brings negatives, such as people hacking systems and cheating others out of tickets. The famous Burning Man concert which is already set to break records this year has reported hackers breaking into their ticket system and \”skipping ahead of people\” when buying tickets. The week long festival which already sold 40,000 in the matter of an hour released this statement regarding the hackers:
“Approximately 200 people created a technical ‘backdoor’ to the sale and made their way to the front of the line. Absolutely no tickets were sold before the sale opened, but they were able to purchase the first batch of tickets when the sale started. The good news is that we can track them down, and we’re going to cancel their orders. Steps are being taken to prevent this from happening again in future sales.”
Software engineer Michael Vacirca informed Wired about how the hack was played out:
“They left code in the page that allowed you to generate the waiting room URL ahead of time. If you knew how to form the URL based on the code segment then you could get in line before everyone else who clicked right at noon.”
Although everything has sorted itself out, it\’s scary to think that this might not be the last time we have to deal with cyber hackers.
Source: Wired
