Red-crested Cardinal

The Saint Louis Cardinals have the best on field record in baseball this season, but today their off field record took a few hit points. The New York Times is reporting and Major League Baseball has confirmed that the FBI is investigating the Cardinal organization for illegally hacking, wait for it, the Houston Astros. While, the Astros are also now in first place, in the American League, this was not the case, when this alleged hack occurred. The first indication of this hack occurred last June, when some Astros proprietary info appeared on Deadspin. The Astros complained to MLB, who in turn complained to the FBI and the investigation was launched. Let’s rewind the clock a bit here. According to the NYT, Jeff Luhnow had until 2011 worked in the Cardinals front office. He then left the Cardinals to join the Astros. While, with the Cardinals Luhnow had set up a proprietary computer network called Redbird, which was used to store personnel records, scouting reports, trade negotiation notes and the like. All of those business records that you don’t want disclosed. Then while working for the Astros, Luhnow and other former Cardinals execs that he had recruited created an analogues computer network there, called Ground Control. This is the network that was allegedly hacked. According to the NYT, unnamed Cardinals personnel used the old user names and passwords on the Redbird network, from the former Cardinal execs, to hack into the Astros Ground Control network. That’s right folks, someone didn’t change his password, even though he had changed his employer. The NYT goes on to explain that the FBI has gotten much better at attribution in these hacking cases and according to the article, the hack was traced to the residence of a Cardinals official. IMHO, everyone involved in this story seems to be an idiot.