Major League Baseball's St. Louis Cardinals Accused Of Hacking Houston Astros Player Database

This story takes sports scandals to a whole new level. The New York Times broke the news on June 16 that Justice Department prosecutors and the FBI have been investigating the St. Louis Cardinals staff on accusations that they have hacked the player database of their rival Major League Baseball (MLB) team, the Houston Astros. Why would one of baseball's biggest teams do something so reckless and absurd? Law enforcement figures say this was done by Cardinals personnel to "wreak havoc" on the work of Houston Astros' general manager Jeff Lehnow, who was previously the Cardinals scout between 2003 and 2011. According to the report, the hack was made possible by Cardinals personnel making use a master list of passwords used by Luhnow and other officials during their time at Cardinals to breach the Astros database. So what's the lesson in this for the rest of us? As security experts have often told us: we simply shouldn't use the same passwords across different sites and services.

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