Burning Man hackers get burnt

Hundreds of entrepreneurial and impatient hackers have exploited a loophole to purchase early tickets to the Burning Man festival.

Geeks meddled with Ticketfly's first-in-best-dressed system to jump the queue and push in ahead of the hordes hoping to attend the counter-cultural event.

The Cosmic Corporation, the event's organiser, issued a statement saying it busted the 200 hackers and axed their tickets.

“Approximately 200 people created a technical backdoor to the sale and made their way to the front of the line,” it says.

“Absolutely no tickets were sold before the sale opened at 12:00 pm, but they were able to purchase the first batch of tickets when the sale started.

“The good news, for us, not them, is that we can track them down, and we’re going to cancel their orders.”

@burningman First come first serve? More like the first thousand computer engineerings hack their way to the front and get all the tickets..

— Rice patty (@Ricepattyman) February 18, 2015

Twitter reports about ticket hacking for the week-long desert-fest emerged before it was officially acknowledged.

One San Francisco developer claimed in a since deleted tweet reported by CBS they “navigated @Ticketfly's completely hosed web servers and crawled out with 2 @burningman tickets”.

According to some statistics the queue was processing 10 buyers a second with some 40,000 sold in the first hour.

Festival organisers are fixing their systems to make it harder to hack future festivals, and will re-release the naughtily-obtained tickets as part of last minute sales. They said reports of other glitches are unconfirmed. ®