Report: Cardinals hackers ‘weren’t very good’ at what they were doing
Turns out the St. Louis Cardinals don’t actually have the Best Hackers in Baseball in their employ.
As we enter Week 2 of the MLB hacking scandal — in which members of the Cardinals front office are being investigated for illegally accessing an internal database of the Houston Astros — the latest report from the New York Times says whoever gained access to the Astros’ internal documents wasn’t very good at what he or she was doing.
From Michael S. Schmidt at the Times, who also broke the original story last Tuesday:
Whoever gained access to the Astros’ network tried to take some measures used by experienced hackers to disguise their location. But, law enforcement officials said, the intruders were not adept.
“They tried to mask themselves like an experienced hacker and failed,” said a person briefed on the investigation. “It’s clear they weren’t very good at what they were trying to do.”
The inability to properly cover tracks proved to be a significant break for the F.B.I. When the bureau opened an investigation into the breach last year, agents followed the trail of the intrusion directly to the computer that had been used at the residence in Jupiter.
And while that’s a funny footnote to what’s been an otherwise serious story, the ineptitude of the hacker(s) still hasn’t helped the F.B.I. pinpoint a culprit. As the Times reports, the digital trail led to a house in Jupiter, Fla., used by a number of statistical analysts and computer programmers from the Cardinals front office during spring training in 2014.
[On this week’s StewPod: What punishments should we expect in MLB hacking scandal? ]
Narrowing down who actually initiated the data breach has been tougher, per the Times:
If four or five men were working in the residence at one time, electronic forensics alone may not be able to establish whose fingers were on the keyboard.
“To put it simply, investigators are trying to match up the intrusions with the different times that different Cardinals front-office personnel were on the computer,” said one person briefed on the investigation. “It has been very difficult.”
Since this a federal investigation, being able to determine a specific culprit is of the utmost importance. It easy to imagine — just by what we know already — that pinpointing one person could be tough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
