14 DAY TRIAL // The ticket sale for the Burning Man art festival was tampered with by 200 hackers who found a loophole in the system which allowed them to get in front of the line to get their passes.
The 40,000 tickets available were sold out just one hour after the start of the early sale, which relied on the “first-come, first-served” principle.
Hackers made it to the waiting room before it opened
However, the administrators discovered that some of those making a purchase were sneakier and managed to jump in front of the queue by abusing a technical flaw in the ticketing system powered by Ticketfly.
The details of the hack have not been explained by the Burning Man officials, but the members of the Reddit community have found a possible way that could have achieved the trick.
It appears that JavaScript code available on the waiting room page could be altered to allow hackers access to the waiting room before the ticket sale opened. Anyone registering at the right time (12:00 pm) would thus be at a further point in line.
One method to prevent this would have been to make the waiting page completely inaccessible until sale time, a redditor explains.
“Approximately 200 people created a technical ‘backdoor’ to the sale and made their way to the front of the line. Absolutely no tickets were sold before the sale opened at 12:00 pm, but they were able to purchase the first batch of tickets when the sale started,” Burning Man officials wrote in a blog post explaining that the ticket demand was much higher than the supply.
Hackers identified, no other technical issues found
Nevertheless, Burning Man says that the tricksters can be tracked down and their orders would be canceled; steps to prevent such an issue from happening again have been taken and all the tickets obtained fraudulently will supplement the OMG Sale in August.
The officials also wanted to clarify that their servers did not succumb to the avalanche of requests, although they were affected, but the process was intentionally paused for a short time at one point in order to allow them to catch up to the demand.
As for the rumors about other glitches in the system that allowed the purchase of a ticket, Burning Man said that it found no evidence to support the claims.
