When Adele fans went online to buy tickets to the pop superstar’s world tour last year, they had no idea what exactly they were up against.

An army of tech-savvy resellers that included a little-known Canadian superscalper named Julien Lavallée managed to vacuum up thousands of tickets in a matter of minutes in one of the quickest tour sellouts in history.

Source: CBC

Date: November 10th, 2017

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/paradise-papers-stubhub-1.4395361

Discussion

1) “The speed of the transactions — this isn’t somebody sitting there typing details over and over again.”  Which is another way of saying the the ticket selling company had to know this was going on.  Why wouldn’t the ticket selling company want to stop this behaviour?

2) In any other instance this (massive amounts of traffic to one website in a short amount of time) would be called a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.  How do companies stop DDoS attacks or differentiate them from legitimate traffic?