Claude Helped a Hacker Find a Way to Issue Tickets to Almost Every US Music Festival

Fears about AI tools capable of autonomous hacking usually involve nightmare scenarios like the theft of nuclear launch codes or zeroed-out bank reserves. Far more plausible, it turns out, is asking AI to gain super-administrator access on a ticketing website and then issuing yourself and all of your friends free VIP backstage passes to Bonnaroo.

That was the discovery of security researcher Ian Carroll, who used the AI tool Claude Opus 4.7 in April to discover a technique that allowed him full access to the systems of Front Gate Tickets, which handles ticketing for practically every major US music festival, from Lollapalooza and South by Southwest to Austin City Limits. Carroll found that Front Gate, which like Ticketmaster is a subsidiary of the event company Live Nation Entertainment, had a bug in its website that he—with Claude’s help—could exploit to gain access to millions of customer or staff records and freely issue tickets for any event, of any value, to himself or whoever he chose.

“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,” says Carroll, who runs the startup Seats.aero but also does independent security research. “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, in fact, take advantage of his ticket-issuing superpower, and instead reported his findings to Front Gate, which says it has now patched the vulnerability. When WIRED contacted the company, it responded with a statement that thanked Carroll for reporting the hackable flaw and described the incident as a successful collaboration that had resulted in improvements to its 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 reads. “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.”

Even now that the flaw is fixed, though, the incident demonstrates just how broadly AI may be able to dig up hackable bugs in every facet of the internet. Carroll—who is part of Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program, which allows approved security researchers to use its tools for certain hacking functions—says he was taken aback by how easily Claude came up with key elements of his technique for breaking into the Front Gate site. “I think there's a very good chance it could have found this exploit end-to-end without me doing anything at all,” Carroll says.

When WIRED reached out to Anthropic, the company responded in a statement that it “created our Cyber Verification Program to make advanced security capabilities available to defenders so they can conduct exactly this sort of research that helps make the world’s code safer.” It 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.

In its response to WIRED, Front Gate’s spokesperson argued that the company’s security safeguards limited the exposure of personal information, that the fraudulent issuing of tickets would have left an audit trail, and that tickets issued by a hacker would have been detected and canceled before they could be used. Carroll counters that those claims are uncertain at best. He says he successfully gained super-administrator privileges on the company’s platform without any discernible response from the company, and did in fact access the site via a public-facing login portal.

Carroll also notes that Front Gate doesn’t claim to have evidence the vulnerability wasn’t previously exploited. What’s more, Front Gate confirmed Carroll’s findings after he shared a draft of a blog post about his discovery with the company, prior to WIRED reaching out to Front Gate. In its response to Carroll at the time, the company didn’t dispute that he was able to generate tickets at will.

Carroll says he first became aware of Front Gate a couple of months ago, when he was considering attending Electric Daisy Carnival, a giant electronic dance music festival in his hometown of Las Vegas. He saw that the festival’s ticketing was run by Front Gate and was intrigued to see when he checked other festivals’ websites that the same company ran ticketing 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 who specializes in finding web vulnerabilities, he decided to poke around Front Gate’s web domain for bugs. He quickly found what looked like a SQL injection vulnerability—a common flaw that allows a hacker to input commands into a text field on a website, causing them to run on the site’s backend and sometimes send back data stored there in a database. But a web application firewall on the site appeared to be blocking him from exploiting it.

So he asked Claude Opus 4.7, the most advanced AI model Anthropic made available to the general public at the time, to find a way to exploit the flaw. It immediately coded a hacking technique that bypassed the firewall. “It was the first time, really, that I had a vulnerability that I didn't fully understand,” says Carroll. “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 had, in fact, found that a “nested SQL query”—a SQL query inside of another SQL query—could evade the firewall’s detection. Soon the AI tool had written a script that displayed samples from a table of 500 databases of exposed customer information. In total, Carroll believes that the vulnerability he and Claude found 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 quickly found that he could also take over staff accounts. He searched for a super administrator’s account, clicked the option to reset its password, and was able to find the reset code that the site had sent to the administrator’s email stored in the site’s backend. He then used it to confirm the reset, setting a new password and 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 kind of shopping cart. “It seems like you could do that for every single event that you wanted to,” Carroll says. (He didn’t actually complete an order and issue any tickets for fear of crossing a line and being charged with fraud.)

Carroll was surprised to see just how easy his takeover method was: No two-factor authentication prevented a leaked, stolen, or guessed password from giving someone full access. “There's just this one centralized company issuing all tickets for every single festival,” Carroll says. “And even without this vulnerability, if you knew someone's password, you could just log in without any verification and issue free tickets.”

Perhaps most remarkable, Carroll says, is that Front Gate didn’t appear to have properly audited its own site for simple vulnerabilities, either with human hunters or the AI ones that seem to now make the bug-finding process scarily easy.

“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.”