Researcher Uses Claude to Breach Front Gate Festival Ticketing
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Ian Carroll used Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 in April to find a SQL injection flaw in Front Gate Tickets that gave him super-administrator access to issue tickets—including $4,000 Bonnaroo VIP passes—to himself or anyone else at will.
- Claude autonomously coded a bypass using a "nested SQL query" that evaded Front Gate's web application firewall, exposing 500 databases containing names, emails, and mailing addresses (but not credit card info) of millions of customers and staff.
- Front Gate Tickets, a Live Nation Entertainment subsidiary, handles ticketing for nearly every major US music festival except Coachella—including Lollapalooza, SXSW, Austin City Limits, and Bonnaroo—giving the bug sweeping potential reach across the industry.
- Carroll took over a super-administrator account by triggering a password reset and reading the reset code directly from the site's backend, with no two-factor authentication blocking the takeover.
- Anthropic said Carroll participated in its Cyber Verification Program and that without program approval, his use of Claude for the hack would have been detected and blocked.
- Front Gate patched the vulnerability within 24 hours, stated there was no evidence of exploitation or customer compromise, and described the incident as a successful collaboration—Carroll responsibly reported his findings and never actually issued any tickets.
Why it matters: The incident exposes how Front Gate's near-monopoly on US festival ticketing—combined with absent two-factor authentication on admin accounts—creates systemic risk: one unpatched bug in one platform could have granted access to hundreds of major events and millions of customer records, and Carroll notes the company hadn't audited for even basic vulnerabilities.
