HOUSTON — The Houston Astros said Monday that they have been the victims of hackers who accessed their servers and published months of internal trade talks on the Internet.
"It was an illegal activity and we’re going to pursue it and try and find out who did it and prosecute," general manager Jeff Luhnow said.
The team is working with the FBI and Major League Baseball security to try who was responsible for the breach.
Luhnow said the team learned of the hacking about a month ago. The team responded on Monday after the website Deadspin.com published a story about the breach.
Among the items involved talks with Miami to trade 2012 top overall pick Carlos Correa and rookie George Springer for Marlins star slugger Giancarlo Stanton.
Luhnow said some of the information was accurate and some was not, but he wouldn’t discuss what portions fell into which category. He said the Astros have since upgraded the security on their system.
"I don’t know if anybody can say for sure that any system is 100 per cent secure, but we’re working on it," Luhnow said. "We’ve done a security review and we’re going to continue to do more. Obviously information is important in our industry as it is in any industry, and we want to do everything we can to protect the information."
Luhnow has reached out to other teams to apologize that they were involved in the breach as well.
"Some of it is not accurate and there’s information out there that affects other teams and individual players that’s not accurate," he said. "And just in general when you have a conversation with another team it’s a conversation between two individuals or two clubs. It’s not meant to be shared with the world. So I feel bad about that."
The Astros rely heavily on sabermetrics in their evaluation of players and have been open about the fact that they use an online database to house their proprietary information. Luhnow isn’t sure if that’s why they were targeted, but he knows they are far from the only team which stores data about players and trades online.
"You have to think about it: it’s the double-edged sword of technology makes things easier, but if things like this are capable of happening it’s definitely a risk that every team should probably think about now in light of this happening to us," he said. "It happened to us. Could it have happened to other clubs? I don’t know."
"One of the things I have been talking to my counterparts about with other clubs is recommending that everybody take a look at their own security systems and make sure they don’t get hacked the way that we were. Because this definitely was an illegal activity," he said,
