14 DAY TRIAL // The Houston branch of the FBI is investigating employees of the Saint Louis Cardinals baseball team for hacking into the private database of a rival competitor, the Houston Astros.
Apparently, the whole affair started back in 2011 when Jeff Luhnow, head of the Cardinals' scouting and player development department, left the team to be the Astros' new General Manager.
In his new role with the Astros, Mr. Luhnow went on to set up an internal database for storing player details and internal communications, just like he did when he first joined the Cardinals.
It was all done out of revenge
Since Mr. Luhnow is an adept and successful implementer of Moneyball, an analytical & sabermetric approach to assembling baseball teams, his player databases played a crucial role when turning around the good fortunes of both the Cardinals and Astros teams.
According to the FBI, the hacking (if you can call it that) took place back in 2013, when a Cardinal employee took a look over Mr. Luhnow's former passwords for the original Cardinals player database, and tried them on the new Astros system as well.
This might sound really blunt, but I don't know who you can call stupider after you read this. Either the Cardinals employee who accessed an unauthorized database of a rival team from his home computer, or Jeff Lunhow, who hadn't bothered to choose a different password for the Astros database, from the one he had while with the Cardinals.
All in all, the whole affair is pretty funny, and is extremely unworthy for the term "hacking," since hacking usually involves smart programmers who go around complex security protocols to reach information while trying to remain undetected.
The hacker could have gotten away clean
To put the cherry on top, the Cardinals employee wasn't only happy to access the Astros player database, but also went on in 2014 to post the Astros player trade talks online, via the Anonbin network.
This very last action was the one that doomed him, the Astros tech department realizing they've been hacked, and going on to enlist the FBI's help to find the culprit.
The guilty party was identified using a simple analysis of database access logs, where the FBI quickly located an IP address from Saint Louis, which lead to a home address where a former Cardinals employee used to live.
No names were released until now by the FBI, and the MLB said it would wait for the investigation to conclude to take any actions against the Cardinals or its employees.