By Alfred Branch, Jr.
The Colorado Rockies may have been swept out of the World Series by the Boston Red Sox over the weekend, but they’re still playing in the justice game.
Early last week, the team’s online World Series ticketing operation was hacked and by the end of the week, the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations had opened an investigation into the cyber crime. The Rockies were using servers and a system by ticketing solutions company Paciolan.
Laura Eimiller, spokesperson for the FBI’s Los Angeles bureau, confirmed for TicketNews that an investigation was opened in relation to the incident, but she could not offer many details.
“The bureau is investigating whether this was an intentional or deliberate intrusion, or whether it was a system malfunction, and determine who’s responsible,” she said, adding that while the L.A. office has investigated other cyber crimes, such as “denial of service” cases where a competing company may launch a computer-based attack on another company, this is the first time to her knowledge that the L.A. office was involved in a cyber investigation concerning the ticketing industry.
Shaw Taylor, spokesperson for Paciolan, did not return a call seeking comment, but according to published reports, the company blamed last week’s attack on software “bots” that jammed the system with more than 8.5 million hits in the first 90 minutes after tickets became available, at which time Paciolan voluntarily shut off the system because it allegedly couldn’t determine which were legitimate ticket requests and which ones were not.
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If 8.5 millon hits brings down their whole system, what kind of system do they have. One vistor going in to buy tickets can create multiple hits, and most users use many browsers and constantly hit refresh. Its very possible that 50,000 local users from Denver could have crashed their system. MLB should stick with Tickets.com or TM
Paciolan was acquired by Ticketmaster in July 2007 so it would seem that they were using TM's infrastructure. A cyber attack and/or consumer demand exceeding system capacity seems to be the leading culprits.
Actually, the paciolan deal is still before the competition people and they are operating as two distinct companies - Paciolan can't use TM stuff and TM can't use Paciolan stuff right now.
When the Rockies first announced they were going to do all their World Series ticket sales online, everyone said the site would crash. Then, surprise! it crashed. Any chance the "malicious attack" could just be the Rockies management taking advantage of the RMG Technologies scandal that's been in the news? It will be interesting to see if there was really a cyber crime here or if it's just a case of the boy who cried bots.