So he asked Claude Opus 4.7, the most advanced AI model Anthropic made available to the general public at the time, to find a way to exploit the flaw. It immediately coded a hacking technique that bypassed the firewall. \u201cIt was the first time, really, that I had a vulnerability that I didn\u2019t fully understand,\u201d says Carroll. \u201cI had to go back and read what Claude had written to understand the bypass, because I didn\u2019t write it. Claude did it completely by itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Claude had, in fact, found that a \u201cnested SQL query\u201d \u2013 a SQL query inside of another SQL query \u2013 could evade the firewall\u2019s detection. Soon the AI tool had written a script that displayed samples from a table of 500 databases of exposed customer information. In total, Carroll believes that the vulnerability he and Claude found would have provided access to the information of millions of customers \u2013 including names, emails and mailing addresses, but not credit card details \u2013 as well as that of Front Gate\u2019s staff.<\/p>\n
With access to staff data, Carroll quickly found that he could also take over staff accounts. He searched for a super administrator\u2019s account, clicked the option to reset its password and was able to find the reset code that the site had sent to the administrator\u2019s email stored in the site\u2019s back end. He then used it to confirm the reset, setting a new password and taking over the administrator\u2019s account.<\/p>\n
Soon he was looking at the most expensive tickets he could find for Bonnaroo and adding them as comp tickets to a kind of shopping cart. \u201cIt seems like you could do that for every single event that you wanted to,\u201d Carroll says. (He didn\u2019t actually complete an order and issue any tickets for fear of crossing a line and being charged with fraud.)<\/p>\n
Carroll was surprised to see just how easy his takeover method was: no two-factor authentication prevented a leaked, stolen or guessed password from giving someone full access. \u201cThere\u2019s just this one centralised company issuing all tickets for every single festival,\u201d Carroll says. \u201cAnd even without this vulnerability, if you knew someone\u2019s password, you could just log in without any verification and issue free tickets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps most remarkable, Carroll says, is that Front Gate didn\u2019t appear to have properly audited its own site for simple vulnerabilities, either with human hunters or the AI ones that seem to now make the bug-finding process scarily easy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just feels concerning when you think these very professional music festivals with professional websites are well run,\u201d says Carroll. \u201cThen you get access, and you realise it\u2019s all held together by duct tape and prayers.\u201d<\/p>\n