A security researcher recently used an AI model to gain full administrator access to the ticketing systems of nearly every major US music festival, allowing him to issue unlimited free VIP passes.
The discovery
Ian Carroll, a security researcher and founder of the startup Seats.aero, discovered the flaw in April. He employed Claude Opus 4.7 to bypass security controls on Front Gate Tickets. The company processes transactions for almost every major US music festival, including Lollapalooza, South by Southwest, and Austin City Limits. Like Ticketmaster, Front Gate is a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment.
Carroll found a bug that let him access millions of customer and staff records. He could issue tickets for any event, of any value, to himself or anyone else. He noted the ease with which he could generate high-value items.
“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,” Carroll said. “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 did not use his new powers. He reported the issue to Front Gate. The company stated it had patched the vulnerability. In a response to WIRED, Front Gate thanked Carroll and described the event as a successful collaboration that improved their security.
“This was resolved within 24 hours, and we can confirm there is no evidence of exploitation, ticket impact, or compromise of customer information,” the statement read. “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.”
Conflicting accounts
Carroll disputes the company’s claim that the breach did not happen on a public-facing system. He says he accessed the site via a public login portal and gained super-administrator privileges without any discernible response from the company.
Front Gate’s spokesperson argued that security safeguards limited the exposure of personal information. They claimed that fraudulent ticket issuance would leave an audit trail and that tickets issued by a hacker would be detected and cancelled before use. Carroll counters that these claims are uncertain at best.
Furthermore, Front Gate confirmed Carroll’s findings after he shared a draft blog post about his discovery, prior to WIRED contacting them. At that time, the company did not dispute that he was able to generate tickets at will.
How the exploit worked
Carroll first noticed Front Gate while considering attending Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. He saw that the festival used Front Gate for ticketing and realised the same company ran sites for practically every major US music festival other than Coachella.
“This is like Ticketmaster but for music festivals,” he remembers thinking. “They have the monopoly, essentially.”
As a security researcher, he began poking around Front Gate’s web domain for bugs. He quickly found what looked like a SQL injection vulnerability. This is a common flaw that allows a hacker to input commands into a text field, causing them to run on the site’s backend and sometimes send back data stored in a database. A web application firewall on the site appeared to be blocking him from exploiting it.
He asked Claude Opus 4.7 to find a way to exploit the flaw. The AI immediately coded a technique that bypassed the firewall.
“It was the first time, really, that I had a vulnerability that I didn’t fully understand,” Carroll says. “I had to go back and read what Claude had written to understand the bypass, because I didn’t write it. Claude did it completely by itself.”
Claude identified that a nested SQL query could evade the firewall’s detection. The tool then wrote a script that displayed samples from a table of 500 databases of exposed customer information. Carroll believes the vulnerability would have provided access to the information of millions of customers, including names, emails, and mailing addresses, but not credit card details, as well as that of Front Gate’s staff.
With access to staff data, Carroll could take over staff accounts. He searched for a super administrator’s account, clicked the option to reset its password, and found the reset code the site had sent to the administrator’s email stored in the backend. He used it to confirm the reset and set a new password, taking over the administrator’s account.
Soon he was looking at the most expensive tickets he could find for Bonnaroo and adding them as comp tickets to a shopping cart. “It seems like you could do that for every single event that you wanted,” Carroll says. He did not complete an order or issue any tickets for fear of being charged with fraud.
Carroll was surprised to see how easy the takeover method was. No two-factor authentication prevented a leaked, stolen, or guessed password from giving someone full access. Even without this vulnerability, knowing someone’s password would allow someone to log in without verification and issue free tickets.
Perhaps most remarkable is that Front Gate did not appear to have properly audited its own site for simple vulnerabilities, either with human hunters or the AI tools that now make bug-finding easier.
“It just feels concerning when you think these very professional music festivals with professional websites are well-run,” says Carroll. “Then you get access, and you realize it’s all held together by duct tape and prayers.”
What it means
Anthropic stated it created its Cyber Verification Program to make advanced security capabilities available to defenders so they can conduct research that helps make the world’s code safer. The company added that if Carroll had not been part of the program, his use of Claude to hack Front Gate’s systems would have been detected and blocked.
