I have strong interest in this story because, one you probably never heard of this happening with an employee from a sport franchise, and two, I am a baseball fan. This article is about an employee of the St. Louis Cardinals hacking the internal network of the Houston Astros. Chris Correa, who was a former scout for the St Louis Cardinals was sentenced to almost four years for hacking into the Houston Astros player database. Correa was able to hack the internal network of the Houston Astros and gain access to statistics, and projections that were gathered by the front office of the Astros. Corrrea was able to do this by getting the old password from a former employee who is now the general manager for the Houston Astros. The federal government estimated that this information was worth 1.7 million dollars. In my opinion, cases like this is why companies enforce complex passwords, changing passwords often, and telling clients not to give their password out to anyone.
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Very interesting article. I know a lot of sports team these days are investing heavily into data and analytics. The Phillies for example hired an ex-Google employee to run their baseball statistics program and invested over a million dollars in a data analytics system. Now that more teams are moving towards evaluating potential players using information systems, instead of the classical way of scouting them, I wonder if they will start taking cyber security seriously.
Brent,
This is an interesting article. Contrary to what many believe, hacking does not require a ton of technical knowledge, or sophisticated hacking techniques to gain control of a system. Employees should seek permission to wipe their personal laptops prior to leaving a company. Also, it is never a good idea to reuse passwords. I agree, if they would have had a password policy and a dual-factor authentication control in place, it may have reduced the likelihood that Correa would have been able to breach the Astros’ Ground Control system. Also, many professional sports teams are not resorting to Big Data Analytics to assist with scouting, and identifying trends in what makes players successful. SAP has done several implementations of its HANA software in professional organizations to assist teams with analyzing data.
Also, many professional sports teams are NOW resorting to Big Data Analytics to assist with scouting* I noticed a typo after I posted.
From what I’ve heard, the Astro’s security processes were ineffective. They reset the password, but did not count on the fact that the attacker had access to victims email, so he got the new password. We don’t cover much about incident response in this course, but one take away is to keep digging once you see a compromise. It is pretty rare that only one thing is compromised.