Americans wanting to see Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden in July will have to be at their computer this morning before 1000EST, but they’re still unlikely to bag a prime seat as there’s no beating the machines.

At 1000EST precisely, automated programs created by hackers will stampede ticket sites to be first in the virtual queue and gobble up choice seats. They do it for every big tour, be it Bruce Springsteen or the Black Eyed Peas. Through their high volume of requests and lightning speed, these bots are programmed to elbow out humans and snap up the best tickets to the big profile events so they can be resold at higher prices.

Information from ticket sellers, internet-security experts and law enforcement documents show ticket companies are waging a continuing cyber war against programmers raiding their computers to score the best seats — a war they are not winning.

The recent US court case against Wiseguys - four people accused of illegally buying more than 1.5 million prime tickets - provide a glimpse into a struggle going on for years. The Nevada firm apparently used thousands of different computers, each reaching the ticket window at the exact second it opened and speeding through the security challenges to gain access to the first and best tickets.

Ticket sellers have no choice but to try and fight back via a variety of methods: they search for large volumes of sessions originating from the same computer address, or those that navigate the system suspiciously fast; they keep lists of computer addresses that are suspected of being part of botnets (a network of bots attacking in concert) and they can program their systems to respond slowly to sessions that navigate their website in unusual ways.

Even when transactions have been completed, sellers will look for duplicate purchases from the same credit card and combinations of information that don’t make sense, such as a sale using a credit card with an address that doesn’t match the computer’s location. Then there are the squiggly letters that the user must retype to complete the sale – a challenge designed to foil automated. Except Wiseguys Tickets found a way around them, too...

A new bill in the US state of Connecticut is seeking to outlaws the use of bots but for now the only effective way to stop the bots is to change the game. A lottery or paperless tickets may be one way to restore fairness but neither are popular with the music industry. The case against Wiseguys may encourage sellers to file civil lawsuits, but will this have any impact in an ever evolving technological race? The rise of the bots has raised questions about the industry’s claims of fairness in online sales so perhaps the best the industry can hope is that consumers are informed of how the systems work.

Adapted from an article in The New Jersey Star Ledger