The FBI and Justice Department are investigating front-office officials of the St. Louis Cardinals for allegedly hacking into the Houston Astros’ databases to steal personal information, according to a report by the New York Times on Thursday.
The hacked databases hold internal communication on trades, statistics and scouting reports. Officials have not yet specified which individuals are being investigated, and both teams and the league say they are cooperating with the investigation.
This new information comes one year after the Astros claimed to be attacked by a hacker. The breach might have occurred before then as cyber-attackers can go undetected for an average of 200 days before being discovered, according to a 2015 report by FireEye, a network security company.
These are the first reports of a digital hacking in a professional sport. The trend of data mining has made team’s databases rich with useful information that could give opposing teams an advantage if they get their hands on it.
“Intellectual property is the engine behind the growth revenue and future of companies,” said Craig Newman, the chair of the Privacy and Data Security practice at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. “If intellectual property is compromised, the company’s valuation is severely diminished. The sort of information that is at the center of this investigation is not unlike the intellectual property, or crown jewel, that many companies have.”
When people think of data and baseball they default to the Moneyball phenomenon that saw the Oakland Athletics under Billy Beane find success using data despite a small budget. Data gathering has been adopted by teams across the league, and the information has never been more significant.
“Data analytics has become a more critical driver for sports teams,” Newman said.
“But it is a far cry of compiling data to compete in a strategic way to stealing information from competitors for your advantage. Every league on both the professional and collegiate level should take a hard look at its own data privacy and ask themselves whether or not they have sufficient safeguards in place to protect their confidential information.”
Those means of protection include encryption, data security protocols and a breach plans, says Newman.
The question for sports fans around the world is what a cyber-attack from one of baseball’s most successful and storied franchises means for the integrity of sports and its future in the digital age. Newman believes this is not an isolated incident and should serve as a warning sign for other teams.
“If the allegations are true, it is an incredibly sad statement on the state of athletics,” Newman said. “Rather than playing on a level playing field professional sports teams are attacking the infrastructure of their rivals in order to get a competitive advantage. That is not what sports are all about.”
The investigation, which began last year, is nearing its conclusion, according to Lester Munson, ESPN legal analyst.