LONDON — Some Oasis fans celebrated like a Champagne Supernovawhile others looked back angrily on Saturday, as online ticket sites struggled with demand for the band's first performances in 15 years.

The Britpop-era giant, led by brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, will play 17 shows in Cardiff, Manchester, London, Edinburgh and Dublin starting July 4.

Over 1,000,000 tickets went on sale on Saturday morning, with prices starting at around £74 (slightly below $100) and going as much as a £506 ($666) package that features a pre-show party and merchandise.

Representatives for the band said later within the day that each one tickets had been sold, but hinted that more shows could also be announced, saying: “Anticipation is now rapidly building for details of the international tour dates.”

Many fans were left frustrated of their attempts to get their hands on tickets. Some individuals who tried to access the few authorized sales sites, including Ticketmaster and Gigs and Tours, received error messages, while many others were informed they were in an extended queue.

Josh Jeffery, a videographer who lives near Edinburgh, spent hours working his way up the queue for online tickets before “the whole site crashed” at the ultimate step.

“I gave up, my friends gave up,” said Jeffery, who first saw Oasis in Manchester as a young person in 1996. “We just decided it was too much effort.”

“As I stood in line, I heard “Wonderwall” blaring from my neighbor's house,” he added ruefully. “He obviously had a parking ticket.”

Some fans were able to snap up pre-sale tickets on Friday, with barista Isabelle Doyle saying she was “over the moon” after snagging two seats to one of the band's London shows.

“I've been a fan of Oasis for about 10 years, literally since I used to be 11,” said the 21-year-old. “To finally have the prospect to see them after they helped me grow as a young person is completely amazing and I'm so excited.”

Within hours, tickets were being offered for sale on resale websites for up to £6,000 ($7,800). Oasis issued a warning, saying tickets could only be resold at face value through authorized websites.

“Tickets appearing on other secondary ticket sites are either fake or cancelled by the event organizers,” it said in a statement.

Megan Gordon, a 25-year-old fan from Manchester, said she was “furious” about not getting tickets.

“I don’t really want to pay the resale price, but I will,” she said.

Formed in Manchester in 1991, Oasis were one of the dominant British bands of the 1990s, producing hits such as “Wonderwall,” “Champagne Supernova” and “Don't Look Back in Anger.” Their sound was driven by sing-along rock choruses and the explosive chemistry between guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher and his singer sibling Liam.

Oasis split in 2009 when Noel Gallagher left the band after a backstage argument with his brother at a festival near Paris. Although the Gallagher brothers, now aged 57 and 51, have not performed together since then, both regularly play Oasis songs in their solo performances. They have also criticised each other in the press.

When announcing the reunion, the band said their fans would experience “the spark and intensity” that only comes from sharing the stage together.

Alice Enders, head of research at media consultancy Enders Analysis, said touring has become the main source of income for many musicians and Oasis can expect a big payday – even if the tour, which is limited to the UK and Ireland for now, pales in comparison to global giants such as Taylor Swift's “Eras” tour.

She said Oasis needed to catch up in a live music market where “spending, consumer spending and demand for festivals have risen inexorably”.

“Basically, they missed a 15-year megatrend,” Enders said. “So it's good that they're jumping on the bandwagon now. … If they wait too long, they'll just be a bunch of old geezers.”

The tour is scheduled to begin at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff on July 4 and 5. Oasis will also perform at Heaton Park in Manchester on July 11, 12, 16, 19 and 20; London's Wembley Stadium on July 25, 26 and 30 and August 2 and 3; Edinburgh's Murrayfield Stadium on August 8, 9 and 12; and Dublin's Croke Park on August 16 and 17.

The host cities are expecting an economic boost for hotels, bars, restaurants and shops – especially Manchester, the band's hometown and a city known for its musical heritage.

“This is a homecoming concert,” he said. “When they walk on stage for the primary time, it’s going to be a really special moment.”

Fans acknowledged that given the brothers' frequent feuds, there is a risk that not all dates will go according to plan. But most were undeterred.

Louise Hudson has got tickets for London's Wembley Arena and is planning a “family night” with her brother, sister-in-law and niece.

And as for the Gallaghers: “If they fight, they fight,” she said. “Families, eh?”

When cybercriminals stole five months of customer call logs from AT&T, they found an indirect option to attack the telecommunications giant's data. They found an access point through a cloud computing provider that almost all customers had probably never heard of.

The same goes for the foremost data breach at Ticketmaster, wherein bank card numbers and credentials were stolen, which the corporate confirmed in May.

As our world becomes increasingly digital, so does the quantity of non-public data available for hackers to steal. Everyone leaves a digital footprint once they use devices to speak, shop, monitor their fitness, take heed to music, or upload a document to the cloud. And all of us trust the platforms we use to guard that data.

As more data is collected, the danger of it being compromised also increases. And the results of this are enormous for each consumers and firms.

But the recent hacks at AT&T and Ticketmaster show that it's not only the brands we use that have to protect our digital identities, but in addition the network of corporations they depend on to enable a seamless digital world.

It's a game of cat and mouse, says cybersecurity expert and Georgia Tech professor Mustaque Ahamad, in regards to the relationship between corporations that store data and the hackers who want to take advantage of it.

Hackers are nimble and consistently adapt to search out weaknesses in existing security systems. Companies construct defensive partitions to catch them – they encrypt data, implement access controls and require multiple types of verification. But one all the time wins over the opposite.

“We rely on the Internet and all kinds of online services. We have to be careful and cautious. Attacks can happen and it is not our fault,” said Ahamad. “We have to learn to stay safe in the online world. We will not be able to avoid it.”

All the info collected by corporations has to go somewhere. Companies often don’t have the resources to construct and maintain their very own internal data storage systems, so that they outsource this task to 3rd parties.

Last week, AT&T announced that hackers Data on the calls and text messages of virtually all of its customers over a period of a minimum of five months. AT&T said the hackers downloaded the knowledge in April of this yr from its workspace on a third-party cloud platform that the communications giant later identified as Snowflake.

The data includes digital traces of voice and text communications – the mobile phone numbers that customers called or received calls from, numbers with which AT&T customers exchanged text messages, and the times at which such communications occurred.

The data breach was the most recent of several reported by major corporations because the start of the yr. In May, Ticketmaster confirmed it had detected unauthorized activity in a third-party cloud database and discovered a hacker offering user data on the market on the dark web. In the identical month, Santander Bank reported an information breach involving customer and worker data as a result of unauthorized access to a company database hosted by a third-party provider. Neither company confirmed the name of the third-party provider.

A threat campaign targeting Snowflake's customer databases in April potentially exposed the info of roughly 165 organizations.

According to cybersecurity analyst firm Mandiant, a hacker used compromised credentials stolen using malware to access a customer's Snowflake installation. The hacker used this access to extract data. Multi-factor authentication was not enabled for this account. Around 165 organizations were potentially in danger, in response to Mandiant.

Advance Auto Parts also reported a breach in July and listed Snowflake as an affected supplier in documents submitted to regulators.

Montana-based Snowflake itself was not hacked, the corporate said. In updates on the Snowflake website, Brad Jones, the corporate's chief information security officer, said Snowflake is committed to helping customers protect their accounts and data and now requires multifactor authentication for all users of a Snowflake account.

AT&T, Ticketmaster and Advance Auto Parts didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.

Several Georgia-based corporations and institutions have also been victims of security breaches prior to now. In April, the University System of Georgia confirmed that its user data had been compromised in a serious cyberattack that targeted file transfer software utilized by private and public organizations worldwide to store information. Data stored by Maximus Health Services, a former contractor for the Georgia Department of Community Health, was also compromised in the identical cyberattack.

Not all breaches occur when hackers gain access to third-party platforms. But these platforms are sometimes targeted because they’re information aggregators and store a treasure trove of knowledge. Hackers can compromise numerous victims directly with minimal effort.

Ahamad, a professor on the Georgia Institute of Technology, reduces it to an easy analogy.

“We put our money in banks. And that's why people rob banks,” he said.

Risks and costs

Data breaches are a serious blow to businesses, each financially and reputationally. According to a report by technology and research giant IBM, the worldwide average cost of an information breach to an organization in 2023 was $4.45 million. This figure includes lost revenue as a result of business interruption or system outage, the fee of lost customers, and the cash spent on services to detect and investigate an information breach.

Some of those costs are passed on to consumers, IBM found. In a survey of 533 corporations affected by security breaches, about 57 percent of respondents said they’d increased prices on their business offerings due to breaches.

There are also obvious risks for consumers when trusting corporations to handle their data properly. Some information could appear less sensitive than others, akin to the length of a user's calls versus banking information, social security numbers or health records. But any style of information could be useful to an attacker. For example, a hacker can discover which customers continuously call a business and “spoof” the business's phone number to defraud them.

Metadata tells wealthy stories about who individuals are, what they do and what their secrets are, says researcher John Scott-Railton wrote on X, formerly Twitter, after the AT&T hackAn unauthorized party now has “NSA-level insight into the lives of Americans,” he said.

The risk increases when the info is stacked.

“One of the things I've been thinking about, especially now with the capabilities of AI, is the ability to leverage intelligence, build at scale, and create better attack profiles for people,” said Scott Kannry, co-founder and CEO of cyber management software company Axio.

Many hackers are motivated by financial gain. In some cases, they use online marketplaces on the dark web to sell stolen data to other parties. The dark web is part of the web that is just accessible with special software or authorization. It is intentionally hidden and protects users from surveillance and tracking, which has made it a hub for marketplaces where stolen material is usually offered on the market.

Others can use the stolen data on to make unauthorized purchases or commit identity theft. In the recent AT&T data breach, a member of the hacking team accepted greater than $300,000 in ransom from the corporate to delete the info. The technology magazine Wired reported.

Some experts like Scott-Railton consider data breaches will proceed to occur until corporations face fines for them. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued recent rules around this time last yr requiring publicly traded corporations to reveal cybersecurity incidents inside 4 business days of determining materiality. An incident is material if it significantly impacts an organization's operations, repute or funds.

In the meantime, businesses and consumers can take precautions to guard themselves. One of the longest-known risks to humanity is fire, Kannry said, and the world has yet to search out an answer.

Companies can put money into detection technology up front to enhance their security posture. In the case of among the breaches linked to Snowflake, cybersecurity firm Mandiant found that compromised accounts didn’t have multifactor authentication enabled. A hacker only needed a legitimate username and password to realize access to customer accounts.

“From a business perspective, the attitude – and this is so trite by now – has to be: 'If something hasn't happened to us yet, it's likely to happen in the future,'” Kannry said.

Consumers can practice what Kannry calls good cyber hygiene: using password managers, enabling multi-factor authentication and monitoring their bank statements for suspicious activity.

“There are risks and bad things can happen, whether they happen accidentally or maliciously. In today's climate, is it even remotely possible that such things can be easily resolved? The answer is absolutely no. Such events will continue to occur. So if a building burns down, you rebuild it, you resume operations and life goes on,” Kannry said.

Originally published: July 26, 2024 at 10:58 am

Ticketmaster is alerting customers within the United States, Mexico and Canada to a knowledge breach affecting account holders' personal information, banking details and encrypted bank cards.

In the e-mail “Notification of Data Breach” and a web based article entitled “Ticketmaster data security incident”, Ticketmaster states that the unauthorized activity occurred between April 2 and May 18.

The company said it learned of the information breach on May 23 in an “isolated cloud database hosted by a third-party data services provider.” The company didn’t disclose the name of that third-party provider.

The New York Times reported at the top of May that the information theft claimed by the hacking group ShinyHunters affected greater than 500 million Ticketmaster customers. ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for data thefts at Microsoft and AT&T, in addition to dozens of other corporations, the Times reported, citing federal prosecutors.

The company stated that the information theft affected basic customer information equivalent to name, date of birth, bank details, bank card numbers and expiration dates. The company didn’t disclose in the e-mail or the notice how many shoppers were affected by the information theft.

“We take data privacy very seriously and work with appropriate authorities, including law enforcement, as well as credit card companies and banks,” Ticketmaster said in its online post.

The company said its accounts “remain secure.”

Ticketmaster said customers who didn’t receive a letter by email or first-class post were unlikely to be amongst those affected by the information breach. Customers who did receive a letter or email are advised to watch their banking details, change their passwords and consider a 12 months of free “identity monitoring”.

The same day Ticketmaster learned of the information breach, the U.S. Department of Justice and 30 state and district attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against the corporate and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. The sweeping criticism accused the businesses of operating an illegal monopoly on live events in America – stifling competition and driving up prices for fans.

The aim of the lawsuit is to interrupt up the alleged monopoly, which the federal government believes harms smaller organizers, artists and fans.

Live Nation has long denied violating antitrust laws and said on May 23 that the lawsuit “will not resolve issues important to fans related to ticket pricing, service fees and access to in-demand shows.”

Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010 and have become the world's largest ticket seller.

In recent weeks, more details have emerged about one other major data breach affecting AT&T customers.

A cyberattack on the telecommunications giant in 2022 exposed the information of “almost all” of its customers, the corporate said on July 12. The attack didn’t affect the content of calls or text messages, AT&T said.

“We have taken steps to shut down the illegal access point,” AT&T said in a press release. The company said it’s working with law enforcement to discover everyone involved and one person has been arrested.

The compromised data included files containing recordings of calls and text messages from greater than 100 million mobile and landline customers from May 2022 to October 2022. Recordings from January 2, 2023, were also compromised for a small number of shoppers, the corporate said, but didn’t provide specific details.

Originally published: July 25, 2024 at 12:54 pm