By Oscar Raymundo, Wired

Burning Man has practically gone mainstream. The once-fringe desert camping festival is now cultural fodder for The Simpsons and Taco Bell commercials. Celebrities and CEOs routinely attend. So it’s no surprise that 40,000 Burning Man tickets sold out in less than an hour last Wednesday when they went on sale.

But software engineers in Silicon Valley hacked into the Burning Man ticketing system powered by Ticketfly to cut to the front of the queue. Who needs luck when you have engineering skills and you’re willing to use ‘em for your advantage?

Well, apparently everyone. Burning Man officials, not ones to let cosmic karma pass them by, announced on Friday that they will find and cancel the hacked ticket orders.

“The good news (for us, not them) is that we can track them down, and we’re going to cancel their orders,” according to Megan K. Miller, Burning Man’s director of communications. “Steps are being taken to prevent this from happening again in future sales.”

While 80,000 would-be Burners all over the world waited their turn in a so-called “first come first serve” online queue to purchase tickets, 200 software-savvy engineers discovered a design flaw on the ticket page that allowed them to generate a spot ahead of everyone else in line. 1Jonathan Hart, a software engineer at Idle Games in San Francisco, tweeted that he had somehow navigated Ticketfly’s web servers and “crawled out” with two tickets to Burning Man.

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