Claude-Assisted Hack Exposes Major Flaw at Ticketmaster-Owned Front Gate Tickets

Front Gate Tickets — the Ticketmaster-owned festival and event ticketing company used by nearly every major music festival across the U.S. — was just hacked via an AI tool, allowing one user to have access to any festival ticket of their choosing.

According to Wired, security researcher Ian Carroll used the AI tool Claude Opus 4.7 in April to discover a technique that allowed him to gain full access to the systems of Front Gate Tickets. With Claude’s assistance, Carroll gained super administrator access to the site, giving him access to millions of customer or staff records. Additionally, he was able to freely issue tickets for any event — of any value — to himself.

Carroll, who runs the startup Seats.aero and works on independent security research, said it was “pretty cool to see a ticket that’s $4,000, and I could just hit a button and issue as many as I wanted.”

“I could go to every single event with no limitations or restrictions: I could get the backstage pass or whatever they sell to the super VIPs–even if it’s sold out,” Carroll said.

When Carroll first poked around Front Gate Tickets’ website for bugs, he found a flaw that allows a hacker to input commands into a text field on the website. While there was a firewall on the site that blocked him from exploiting it, Claude Opus 4.7’s AI model Antropic helped him code a hacking technique to bypass the firewall.

Once Carroll had access to staff data, he realized he could take over staff accounts and ultimately, access the administrator’s account. With this kind of control, Carroll was able to add expensive tickets to his shopping cart, including a 4-day Platinum Ticket to Bonnaroo.

Carroll quickly found that Front Gate Tickets runs ticketing for practically every U.S. music festival, aside from Coachella.

“This is like Ticketmaster but for music festivals,” Carroll said he remembered thinking at the time. “They have a monopoly, essentially.”

While Carroll did not take advantage of his findings, he did report the issue to Front Gate Tickets, who resolved the vulnerability.

Front Gate Tickets released a statement to Wired, noting that “this was resolved within 24 hours, and we can confirm there is no evidence of exploitation, ticket impact, or compromise of customer information.”

“The issue was identified by a responsible security researcher who used AI-assisted tools to bypass standard firewall security controls and access an internal API used by entry scanners at festival venues — not a consumer-facing system or public login portal,” the company said.

The issue on the backend of Front Gate Tickets may be resolved, but this incident poses a greater concern: how easily AI is used to bypass barriers across the ticketing industry.

This isn’t the first time Ticketmaster has experienced security issues; the ticketing giant and its parent company Live Nation faced a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit a few years ago after 1.3 terabytes of data was accessed by a hacker group, involving hundreds of millions of customers across the world. The information was said to be up for sale on the dark web, with an asking price of $500,000.