The St. Louis Cardinals are known as one of the best franchises in Major League Baseball and can usually be seen in the playoffs, winning the “right way.” Well today may have left a black-eye on their franchise after the Cardinals were accused of hacking in to the database of the Houston Astros.
The St. Louis Cardinals are being investigated for hacking the databases of the Houston Astros to access information to statistics, scouting reports and internal discussions about players, trades and other proprietary information.
“Major League Baseball has been aware of and has fully cooperated with the federal investigation into the illegal breach of the Astros’ baseball operations database,” the MLB statement said. “Once the investigative process has been completed by federal law enforcement officials, we will evaluate the next steps and will make decisions promptly.”
Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred indicated later Tuesday that MLB will not reach judgment until the investigation progresses further.
“I think until we know, this is different from when we might investigate, for example, a drug case where we’re one of the investigators,” Manfred said during a news conference at Fenway Park. “I have access to all the facts real time in a situation like that. That’s just not the case here, and because I don’t know exactly what the facts are and I don’t think the person who wrote the Times story knows exactly what the facts are, that it really doesn’t make sense for me to speculate as to how serious a problem I have.
“Soon enough, I think that we will have full information as to what went on. I think you can rest assured that we will act appropriately at that point in time. I think people should also not lose sight of the fact that in addition to what happened, there’s the question of who did it, who knew about it, who was the organization responsible, the individual responsible — there’s a whole set of issues that are going to be needed to be sorted through.”
In June 2014, the Astros claimed to have been victims of hackers who accessed their servers and published months of internal trade talks on the Internet. It was then that the team began working with the FBI and Major League Baseball security in an effort to identify who was responsible for the breach.
According to the Times, the FBI believes that Cardinals officials gained access to the Astros’ database by using a list of passwords associated with Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow dating to his tenure with the Cardinals from 2003 until he left for Houston after the 2011 season.
“I don’t know if anybody can say for sure that any system is 100 percent secure, but we’re working on it,” Luhnow said last year when the team initially addressed the security breach. “We’ve done a security review and we’re going to continue to do more. Obviously information is important in our industry as it is in any industry, and we want to do everything we can to protect the information.”
The Astros rely heavily on sabermetrics in their evaluation of players and have been open about the fact that they use an online database to house their proprietary information. Luhnow isn’t sure whether that’s why they were targeted, but he knows they are far from the only team that stores data about players and trades online.
