Claude Helped a Hacker Find a Way to Issue Tickets to Almost Every US Music Festival
Summary
Security researcher Ian Carroll used Claude Opus (an AI assistant) to discover a vulnerability in Front Gate Tickets' website that allowed him to gain super-administrator access (high-level control over a system) and issue free tickets to music festivals across the US. Carroll reported the bug responsibly rather than exploiting it, and Front Gate patched the vulnerability within 24 hours, demonstrating how AI tools can help identify serious security flaws in web systems.
Solution / Mitigation
Front Gate Tickets patched the vulnerability. According to the company's statement: 'This was resolved within 24 hours, and we can confirm there is no evidence of exploitation, ticket impact, or compromise of customer information.' Anthropic also noted that if Carroll had not been part of its Cyber Verification Program (an approved security research program), his use of Claude to hack the system would have been detected and blocked.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://www.wired.com/story/claude-helped-a-hacker-find-a-way-to-issue-tickets-to-almost-every-us-music-festival/
First tracked: July 1, 2026 at 08:01 AM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 92%