Former Cardinals’ scouting director admits to hacking Astros’ computers

Correa, who has a master’s in psychology, took over as the Cardinals’ scouting director in December 2014.

Correa grabbed that information and used it to access Victim B’s Ground Control account on March 10, 2014, viewing 118 pages of “confidential” information including a ranking of players the Astros wanted, information on trade discussions, evaluations of players at various levels, including worldwide players to whom the Astros were mulling offers, the charging documents say.

Caption + Chris Correa, the former director of scouting for the St. Louis Cardinals, leaves the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse, Friday, Jan. 8, 2016, in Houston. With each count comes a possible maximum sentence of five years plus a $250,000 fine. Correa was able to get into the Astros’ system via the ex-employees’ email account by using a variation of the password found on his old Cardinals computer. The value of the information which Correa accessed was set at $1.7 million, reported by the Houston Chronicle. The Cardinals organization could face penalties of an undetermined nature from Major League Baseball.

Clearly, Mr. Correa either has a serious problem and does not know when to quit, or he was instructed to repeatedly and continuously hack into the Astros’ database without any concern for outcome. Last June, the news broke that several months of proprietary information from the Houston Astros’ private network had been leaked, and the breach was alleged to be associated with the Cardinals. The Cardinals internal investigation resulted in Chris Correa’s being placed on a leave of absence and ultimately fired.

“Yes, your honor, I accept responsibility for my mistakes”, Correa said, adding that his actions were “stupid”.

Armed with the reused password, Correa was able to access the Astros employee’s email account and Ground Control credentials.

“They were watching what the Astros were doing”, Kenneth Magidson, the USA attorney for the Southern District of Texas in Houston, told reporters after Correa’s guilty plea.

The Astros database was similar to one the Cardinals used, but many teams have similar systems and Luhnow said the Astros created their database.