Ticketfly 2018 Data Breach
Ticketing Platform · Event ticketing and venue commerce services · Event ticketing platform · USA
Ticketfly Event Ticketing Platform Breach (2018): 26 Million Customer Records Including Home Address & Phone Exposed :: Website Taken Offline
Event ticketing platform (now defunct, acquired by Eventbrite)
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
19/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Lower: limited current risk based on data value and recency.
Data Sensitivity i
StandardExposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
26.2MRecords
2018Year
The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.
Crucial data exposed
AddressPhysical address
Breach Summary
Ticketfly, an event ticketing distribution service, had its website defaced by an attacker in May 2018 after the company did not respond to a ransom demand. The attacker had discovered a vulnerability and sought payment in exchange for disclosing it. When Ticketfly did not reply, the attacker posted the stolen data to a publicly accessible location and took the site offline. The breach exposed records tied to over 26.2 million accounts. The leaked data included email addresses, full names, phone numbers, and physical home addresses. No passwords appeared in the publicly posted files, but Ticketfly later acknowledged that hashed password values may also have been accessed during the intrusion. For affected individuals, the combination of contact details and home addresses creates real exposure: the data is enough to enable phishing attempts, account takeover efforts, and targeted scams built around event attendance and purchasing history. No widely reported regulatory enforcement action followed the breach, though Ticketfly issued a public incident update disclosing the potential password exposure. Affected individuals face ongoing risk from phishing and impersonation, particularly messages mimicking ticketing platforms or live event brands. Those who reused passwords across services should treat any accounts sharing Ticketfly credentials as compromised.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
26.2M records analyzed
About Ticketfly
entity_overview:
Why They Hold Your Data
Event-ticketing platforms collect buyer identity, contact details, payment-adjacent records, order history, venue interactions, and attendance-linked data across ticket-commerce workflows.
Recent Developments
Defunct
Data Points Exposed
4 verified field types
Email Address
Full Name
Phone Number
Physical address High
Breach Impact
entity_breach_impact:
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A consumer-service breach: contact and account data supports phishing, account takeover and profile enrichment. For a high-profile principal this is targeting-grade, not merely identity-theft-grade: the combination lets an adversary locate, impersonate, or pressure the principal with little additional work.
What You Should Do
- Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
- Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
- Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.
How ObscureIQ Can Help
- Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
- Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
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