Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Did You See That: Sports Hackers

Now that the FBI has dinged FIFA and the St. Louis Cardinals in a matter of weeks, they may never have better press than they do right now. But this story reported by the New York Times, indicating that the Cardinals are under investigating for hacking the Houston Astros player database, had me wondering whether other teams are doing the same thing. I have desperately been calling my sources across all sports, and have found some interesting tidbits. I've been told all of the passwords to these secret networks have been changed in the last few minutes... or have they?

--> Dan Griffin's personal player database had been protected by the password, "Lebron4MVP" during the playoffs. It had been "Who is really the GM?" during the regular season. Interestingly enough, the passwords are font protected.

--> Sam Hinkie's Sixers computer had the password "Panzer", which surprisingly no one even came close to guessing. Post Draft Lottery, it's been changed to "howitzer". 

--> Skip Bayless has a computer (this is news enough) with the double-password protection of "Johnny" and "clutch". It used to be "Tebow", but after a 7 year-old managed to break through along with his Jets fan father, Skip had no choice.

--> In a rather surprising development, Dave Nonis' old computer for the Leafs was password locked by the word "Corsi". This might be why no one else ever mentioned it in any Leafs front office meetings.

--> Evander Kane's phone is locked by the password "tracksuit", apparently as extra motivation. 

--> Jack Warner's network of financial accounts were protected by the password "Blatter", in an effort to remind himself who to thank when the checks cleared. 

--> One of my sources tried to find his way through the morass of sports twitter accounts that troll in plentiful amounts, and found that over 1,000 of them had the password "nice". He figures there will be 42,069 further sports accounts with the same password.

--> As I type this one out, I'm being told there's an abnormally large group of people named Ted whose passwords are all the same. It's a funny password chain... in any order the passwords are, "promotion", "relegation", and "American". Strange.

--> Jurgen Klinsmann's Californian computers have both a German and English password for even more protection. However he seems to have overwritten both with the chain of "Zelalem" and "fitness". 

--> Finally, what did the former Cardinals officials who moved on to Houston use as his passwords? "Best Fans in baseball". Funny how that when it was tried in Houston, the officials were repeatedly locked out. So eventually, the passwords were changed. To what? "Commencing countdown engines on". 

This is not to encourage anyone to begin hacking secret team computer networks. The FBI is already on a roll with good PR, and finding your sloppy hack-job is only going to inflate their egos. That means you, James Dolan. 

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