“Any time you have a database online, and they are using a communication tool among their employees — whether it is manager, coaches, players, scouts, etc. — all of those communications are potentially vulnerable to being intercepted and manipulated,” says Nathaniel Grow, an associate professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University, who has studied the cyber threat to professional sports teams with co-author Scott Shackelford, the Cybersecurity Program chair at IU.
Baseball is wise to steroids (it took long enough), and it is vigilant on the intrusions of gamblers, but what about threats to all its intelligence in cyberspace?
With team personnel meetings likely taking place on Zoom, all it takes is the URL to the meeting to get loose, and a foe can listen in. Grow says general managers of big league teams might want to limit certain information to intimate phone calls rather than conference calls. Shackelford points to a Zoom “backlash” that’s come with its exploding use during the pandemic, with reports of software flaws letting hackers hijack Zoom users’ Mac cameras. “It’s also possible to use brute force to guess Zoom room numbers, or to ‘Zoom bomb,’ especially if the host didn’t use all the correct security precautions,” Shackelford says."