What makes the St. Louis Cardinals hacking scandal really great, aside from the fact that it involves the St. Louis Cardinals, is that it could not have happened if everyone involved hadn’t acted as stupidly as possible.
The Cardinals front-office executives who hacked into the Astros’ database are extremely dumb. You can’t even give them credit for being l337 H4x0rs because all these dummies did was use one of the old passwords Astros GM Jeff Luhnow used when he worked for the Cardinals, and they did it from their own goddamn home, which made it very easy for FBI to track them down. Here is a tip: If you’re going to commit corporate espionage, don’t do it from your home computer. Go find, like, an internet cafe or something.
Jeff Luhnow and his Astros colleagues are pretty dumb. They helped build a proprietary database for storing all sorts of important baseball operations data when they worked for the Cardinals, and then just ported the damn thing over the Astros and slapped a new name on it when they jumped ship. That’s not exceptionally stupid, but what is exceptionally stupid is the fact that they didn’t bother to change their passwords, meaning that all anyone needed to “hack” this proprietary database of sensitive information was access to Luhnow’s old master list of passwords, which still belonged to the Cardinals.
All the people responsible for designing the Astros’ database, known as Ground Control, are way dumb. This is where you are going to store your team’s “collective baseball knowledge,” and you can’t even bother to set up two-factor authentication? Fucking Twitter has two-factor authentication, man. It would be harder for someone to hack into your Twitter account and change your picture to a big penis than it was for vengeful baseball nerds to gain access to a rival team’s sacred database.
Whoever decided to put hacked documents on Anonbin, making them accessible to anyone with an internet connection, is a dimwit. Maybe it was the same execs who perpetrated the hack who did this, in which case they should be fired into the sun for being the stupidest people on the planet, or maybe it was one of their dipshit friends, in which case those execs should still be fired into the sun for being stupid enough to show one of their buddies the fruits of their criminal activity.
Everyone here is an idiot. This story is wonderful.