Baseball Team Hacks Another Team's Networks, FBI Investigates

An anonymous reader writes: The St. Louis Cardinals have been one of the better baseball teams over the past several years. The Houston Astros have been one of the worst. Nevertheless, there is evidence that officials for the Cardinals broke into a network maintained by the Astros in order to gain access to "internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics, and scouting reports." The FBI is now leading an investigation into the breach, and they have served subpoenas to the Cardinals and to Major League Baseball demanding access to electronic correspondence. It's the first known instance of corporate espionage involving a network breach in professional sports. Law enforcement said the intrusion "did not appear to be sophisticated." It seems likely that a personal vendetta against the Astros's general manager is involved.

Comments

Re:Interesting

[halivar]

I have it at on good information that it stopped being cool at user ID 535826.

Re:Somebody explain?

[Anonymous Coward]

They used their ex-GM and ex-employee's passwords from their network to access the Astro's network. But why was it so easy to get their passwords in the first place. Isn't this normally not possible?

Because this:

When Mr. Luhnow was with the Cardinals, the organization built a computer network, called Redbird, to house all of their baseball operations information — including scouting reports and player personnel information. After leaving to join the Astros, and bringing some front-office personnel with him from the Cardinals, Houston created a similar program known as Ground Control.

The guy responsible for building a database for the Cardinals then got a job with the Astros (along with other Cardinal employees) basically STOLE the database when he moved. That's why the passwords for him and the other ex Cardinal employees still worked. I'd say the Astros could be in some trouble themselves.

Re:Learned from the Patriots

[paiute]

Cheating is OK when the reward is championships and the penalty is a wrist slap.

Found the bitter Colts fan.