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>A press release by federal prosecutors said Ticketmaster employees held a division-wide summit during which the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company's computers "as if that were an appropriate business tactic."

>According to the deferred prosecution agreement, a Ticketmaster executive described that the goal was to "choke off" the victim company and "steal back" one of its clients.

This sounds insane. The article started out just describing a single employee abusing their unrevoked access to their previous company's systems, but it's mind-boggling that executives and huge swaths of the company would openly and actively participate. That sounds more unethical than even the shadiest of the Uber "intelligence gathering" revelations.

A bit of irony, as people that were scraping Ticketmaster ended up with Federal charges and took a plea deal.

Pretty interesting story on how it worked, here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgxqb8/the-man-who-broke-tic...

The plea deal: https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newark/press-releases/2010...

The eventual sentences: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nj/Press/files/Lowson,%...

Nice to see them get in trouble for being anticompetitive for once. Would love for this to become trendy.
This is what happens when you pay your company in peanuts when there's no more circus...