Growing Risks to Digital Ticketing Platforms for Large-Scale Events

Large-scale sporting events, including the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, increasingly rely on complex, digitally integrated ticketing ecosystems to manage ticket sales, transfers, validation, and venue access at scale. These platforms, including official primary, resale/exchange, and hospitality marketplace systems, face a range of cyber, fraud, and operational risks that could disrupt purchasing, compromise ticket integrity, delay entry operations, or negatively impact the fan experience during high-profile events.

As the first FIFA World Cup to be co-hosted across three nations (the United States, Canada, and Mexico), with 48 teams competing in 104 matches across 16 stadiums, FIFA and its official ticketing ecosystem, including the FIFA.com/tickets platform and associated resale, exchange, and hospitality systems, face coordination and operational challenges that distinguish the tournament’s threat environment from more centralized, single-country sporting events.

Key threats include cascading platform outages and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware, supply chain and vendor compromise, insider misuse and social engineering, bot-driven fraud and scalping, credential stuffing, state-sponsored and hacktivist activity, and Internet of Things (IoT)/venue infrastructure compromise. Industry data indicates ransomware incidents in the sports and entertainment sector average $4–5 million in potential losses per event, including downtime, remediation, and extortion payments, with supply chain compromise carrying the highest aggregate cost of any attack category. Proactive resilience, rapid incident response, and robust cross-jurisdictional governance across the ticketing industry are essential to minimize downtime, protect fans, and preserve event integrity. Threats to the ticketing ecosystem include both availability attacks designed to disrupt access or degrade services and integrity attacks intended to manipulate ticketing data, transactions, or user trust.

This white paper is intended to support large-scale event planners and security teams, including FIFA and host cities in the United States, as they work to ensure secure and resilient ticketing operations. It provides an assessment of the threats, vulnerabilities, and potential failure scenarios most likely to disrupt the fan experience, impact ticket integrity, or affect stadium access control environments during major sporting events.