Technology
Hacker claims to have 30 million customer records of Australian ticketing giant TEG
A hacker is promoting on a widely known hacker forum customer data allegedly stolen from Australian live events and ticketing company TEG.
On Thursday, the hacker put allegedly stolen TEG data up on the market, claiming to have details about 30 million users, including name, gender, date of birth, username, encrypted passwords and email addresses.
At the top of May, Ticketek, an organization owned by TEG, starts selling tickets disclosed an information breach affecting Australian customer data “which is stored on a cloud-based platform hosted by a reputable, global third-party provider”.
The company stated that “no Ticketek customer accounts were compromised” thanks to the encryption methods used to store their passwords. However, TEG admitted that “customer names, dates of birth and email addresses may have been affected” – data that overlapped with that advertised on the hacker forum.
The hacker included a sample of allegedly stolen data in his post. TechCrunch confirmed that at the least some of the information posted on the forum appears to be legitimate by attempting to arrange recent accounts using the e-mail addresses posted. In many cases, the Ticketek website displayed an error, suggesting that email addresses were already taken.
A TEG spokesperson reached by email didn’t comment by press time.
On its official website, Ticketek states that the corporate “sells over 23 million tickets to over 20,000 events each year.”
While Ticketek didn’t name its “cloud-based platform hosted by a reputable, global third-party provider,” there’s evidence to suggest it would be the snowflake behind a recent spate of data thefts affecting several of its clients, including Ticketmaster, Santander Bank and others.
Now deleted post on the Snowflake website as of January 2023, it was titled: “TEG Personalizes Live Entertainment Experiences with Snowflake.” In 2022, Altis consulting company published a case study detailing how the corporate partnered with TEG “built a modern data platform to accept streaming data into Snowflake.”
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Do you have more details about this incident or other Snowflake-related breaches? From a tool that will not be working, you’ll be able to contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely via Signal on +1 917 257 1382, via Telegram, Keybase and Wire @lorenzofb or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.
When asked to comment on the Ticketek breach, Snowflake spokeswoman Danica Stańczak didn’t respond to our specific questions and as an alternative referred to the corporate’s public statement. Brad Jones, Snowflake’s chief information security officer, said in a press release that the corporate “has not identified evidence to suggest that this action was caused by a security vulnerability, misconfiguration or breach of the Snowflake platform.”
A Snowflake spokesman declined to confirm or deny whether TEG or Ticketek are Snowflake customers.
Snowflake provides corporations around the globe with services that help their customers store data within the cloud. Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant reported earlier this month that cybercriminals had stolen a “significant amount of data” from several Snowflake customers. Mandiant is working with Snowflake to investigate the information breach and in a blog post revealed that the 2 corporations have notified roughly 165 Snowflake customers.
Snowflake blames the hacking campaign on its customers for not using multi-factor authentication, which allowed hackers to use passwords “previously purchased or obtained through stolen information.”
Technology
OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit (update)
Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, who’re suing OpenAI for allegedly copying their work to coach artificial intelligence models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted potentially relevant data.
Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to offer two virtual machines in order that advisors to The Times and Daily News could seek for copyrighted content in their AI training kits. (Virtual machines are software-based computers that exist inside one other computer’s operating system and are sometimes used for testing purposes, backing up data, and running applications.) letterlawyers for the publishers say they and the experts they hired have spent greater than 150 hours since November 1 combing through OpenAI training data.
However, on November 14, OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one among the virtual machines, in keeping with the above-mentioned letter, which was filed late Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
OpenAI tried to get better the information – and was mostly successful. However, since the folder structure and filenames were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news authors’ copied articles were used to build the (OpenAI) models,” the letter says.
“The news plaintiffs were forced to recreate their work from scratch, using significant man-hours and computer processing time,” lawyers for The Times and the Daily News wrote. “The plaintiffs of the news learned only yesterday that the recovered data was useless and that the work of experts and lawyers, which took a whole week, had to be repeated, which is why this supplementary letter is being filed today.”
The plaintiffs’ attorney explains that they don’t have any reason to consider the removal was intentional. However, they are saying the incident highlights that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools.
An OpenAI spokesman declined to make an announcement.
However, late Friday, November 22, OpenAI’s lawyer filed a motion answer to a letter sent Wednesday by attorneys to The Times and Daily News. In their response, OpenAI’s lawyers unequivocally denied that OpenAI had deleted any evidence and as a substitute suggested that the plaintiffs were guilty for a system misconfiguration that led to the technical problem.
“Plaintiffs requested that one of several machines provided by OpenAI be reconfigured to search training datasets,” OpenAI’s attorney wrote. “Implementation of plaintiffs’ requested change, however, resulted in the deletion of the folder structure and certain file names from one hard drive – a drive that was intended to serve as a temporary cache… In any event, there is no reason to believe that any files were actually lost.”
In this and other cases, OpenAI maintains that training models using publicly available data – including articles from The Times and Daily News – are permissible. In other words, by creating models like GPT-4o that “learn” from billions of examples of e-books, essays, and other materials to generate human-sounding text, OpenAI believes there isn’t a licensing or other payment required for examples – even when he makes money from these models.
With this in mind, OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with a growing number of recent publishers, including the Associated Press, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, the Financial Times, People’s parent company Dotdash Meredith and News Corp. OpenAI declined to offer the terms of those agreements. offers are public, but one among its content partners, Dotdash, is apparently earns at the least $16 million a 12 months.
OpenAI has not confirmed or denied that it has trained its AI systems on any copyrighted works without permission.
Technology
Sequoia increases its 2020 fund by 25%
Sequoia says no going out, no problem.
According to data from the Silicon Valley enterprise capital giant, the worth of its Sequoia Capital US Venture XVII fund increased by 24.6% in June at the top of 12 months. Pitchbookwho analyzed data from the University of California Regents Fund.
Sequoia’s margin is notable since the fund hasn’t had any exits yet. This can be a positive development for the 2020 fund vintage, on condition that after the uncertain valuations of 2020 and 2021, this yr’s funds usually are not expected to perform well for any VC. The mismatch is probably going resulting from high AI valuations giving risks a way of an economic recovery that has yet to bear fruit in other sectors. Sequoia is an investor in high-growth artificial intelligence corporations including OpenAI, Glean and Harvey, amongst others.
Sequoia has raised over $800 million for Fund XVII, which closed in 2022.
Technology
Revolut will introduce mortgage loans, smart ATMs and business lending products
Revolutthe London-based fintech unicorn shared several elements of the corporate’s 2025 roadmap at a company event in London on Friday. One of the corporate’s important goals for next yr will be to introduce an AI-enabled assistant that will help its 50 million customers navigate financial apps, manage money and customize software.
Considering that artificial intelligence is at the middle of everyone’s attention, this move shouldn’t be surprising. But an AI assistant could actually help differentiate Revolut from traditional banking services, which have been slower to adapt to latest technologies.
When Revolut launched its app almost 10 years ago, many individuals discovered the concept of debit cards with real-time payment notifications. Users may lock the cardboard from the app.
Many banks now can help you control your card using your phone. However, they’re unlikely to supply AI features that might be useful yet.
In addition to the AI assistant, Revolut announced that it will introduce branded ATMs to the market. These will end in money being spent (obviously), but in addition cards – which could encourage latest sign-ups.
Revolut said it plans so as to add facial recognition features to its ATMs in the longer term, which could help with authentication without using the same old card and PIN protocol. It will be interesting to see the way it implements this technology in a way that complies with European Union data protection regulations, which require explicit consent to make use of biometric data for identification purposes.
According to the corporate, Revolut ATMs will start appearing in Spain in early 2025.
Revolut has had a banking license in Europe for a while, which implies it may offer lending products to its retail customers. It already offers bank cards and personal loans in some countries.
Now the corporate plans to expand into mortgage loans – some of the popular lending products in Europe – with an emphasis on speed. If it’s an easy request, customers should generally expect immediate approval and a final offer inside one business day. However, mortgages are rarely easy, so it will be interesting to see if Revolut overpromises.
It appears that the mortgage market rollout will be slow. Revolut said it was starting in Lithuania, with Ireland and France expected to follow suit. Although all these premieres are scheduled for 2025.
Finally, Revolut intends to expand its business offering in Europe with its first loan products and savings accounts. In the payments space, it will enable business customers to supply “buy now, pay later” payment options.
Revolut will introduce Revolut kiosks with biometric payments especially for restaurants and stores.
If all these features seem overwhelming, it’s because Revolut is consistently committed to product development, rolling out latest features quickly. And 2025 looks no different.
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