The FBI is investigating the St. Louis Cardinals for hacking into the Houston Astros' secure databases
The FBI's Houston field office is investigating several unnamed St. Louis Cardinals officials for allegedly hacking into the Houston Astros' secure databases, The New York Times reports.
Investigators said they believe the cyberattack was carried out by Cardinals officials upset at Jeff Luhnow, who left St. Louis in 2011 to become the Astros' general manager. Luhnow had implemented a secure, internal network with the Cardinals called Redbird, which held information on the team's scouting reports, trades, and other private player and team information. He developed a similar database for the Astros, called Ground Control. FBI officials say they believe front-office Cardinals workers found an old, master list of passwords from Luhnow's time in St. Louis, and used those passwords to hack into the Astros' database; law enforcement officials noted the hack was not particularly sophisticated, and that they had already traced the breach to a computer in a house where Cards officials had lived.
Information from the breach first appeared anonymously online in 2014; Major League Baseball officials originally assumed an independent hacker was to blame and contacted the FBI. A spokesman for MLB said the organization "has been aware of and has fully cooperated with the federal investigation."
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Sarah Eberspacher is an associate editor at TheWeek.com. She has previously worked as a sports reporter at The Livingston County Daily Press & Argus and The Arizona Republic. She graduated from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
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