A while ago, I wrote about a case involving a member of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team staff who improperly accessed a database of the Houston Astros.   There is now an epilogue to report in the case.  The individual who engaged in the illegal access — a scouting director named Chris Correa — was fired by the Cardinals, imprisoned for 46 months, and banned permanently from baseball.  The Cardinals were fined $2 million by Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, and they must forfeit their first two picks in the draft to the Houston Astros.

According to an article about the incident in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “As outlined in court documents, the U.S. attorney illustrated how Correa hacked Houston’s internal database, ‘Ground Control,’ 48 times during a 2½-year period. He viewed scouting reports, private medical reviews and other proprietary information. The government argued that Correa may have sought to determine if Houston borrowed the Cardinals’ data or approach, but the information he accessed was ‘keenly focused on information that coincided with the work he was doing for the Cardinals.'”

As I wrote in my piece about the case, there are several lessons to be learned.  One lesson is that it is a myth that hacking and computer crime must be hi-tech.  Here, Correa’s hacking was nothing sophisticated — he just used another person’s password.  The person had previously worked for the Cardinals, and when he went to the Astros, he kept using the same password.  In my piece, I discussed other lessons from this incident, such as the importance of teaching people good password practices as well as teaching people that just because they have access to information doesn’t make it legal to view the information.  The Cardinals organization appears to have learned from the incident, as the “employee manual has been updated to illustrate what is illegal activity online,” and the organization is using two-factor authentication to protect its own sensitive data.  The article doesn’t say whether the Astros also stepped up their security awareness training by teaching employees not to reuse their old passwords from another team.

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