The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined Ticketmaster UK £1.25million for failing to keep its customers’ personal data secure. The ICO found that the company failed to put appropriate security measures in place to prevent a cyber-attack on a chat-bot installed on its online payment page.

It found that Ticketmaster’s failure to protect customer information is a breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The data breach, which included names, payment card numbers, expiry dates and CVV numbers, potentially affected 9.4m of Ticketmaster’s customers across Europe including 1.5m in the UK.

Investigators found that, as a result of the breach, 60,000 payment cards belonging to Barclays Bank customers had been subjected to known fraud. Another 6,000 cards were replaced by Monzo Bank after it suspected fraudulent use.

James Dipple-Johnstone, Deputy Commissioner, said: “When customers handed over their personal details, they expected Ticketmaster to look after them. But they did not. Ticketmaster should have done more to reduce the risk of a cyber-attack. Its failure to do so meant that millions of people in the UK and Europe were exposed to potential fraud.”

He added: “The £1.25milllion fine we’ve issued today will send a message to other organisations that looking after their customers’ personal details safely should be at the top of their agenda.”

The breach began in February 2018 when Monzo Bank customers reported fraudulent transactions. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Barclaycard, Mastercard and American Express all reported suggestions of fraud to Ticketmaster, but the company failed to identify the problem. Instead, it took Ticketmaster nine weeks from being alerted to possible fraud to monitoring the network traffic through its online payment page.

The ICO’s investigation found that Ticketmaster’s decision to include the chat-bot, hosted by a third party, on its online payment page allowed an attacker access to customers’ financial details.

Although the breach began in February 2018, the penalty only relates to the breach from 25 May 2018, when new rules under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. The chat-bot was completely removed from Ticketmaster’s website on 23 June 2018.

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