Cybersecurity

Attackers target sports teams, too—so the Red Sox are taking steps to protect information

“An organization like the Boston Red Sox has cache and cash,” HYCU CEO Simon Taylor tells IT Brew.
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Francis Scialabba

3 min read

You might think a baseball team like the Boston Red Sox generates a lot of data, and you’d be right: Player stats, payroll records, ticket sales, years without a World Series win, the list goes on. But you might not be prepared for the number of apps and services it uses to manage said data.

“The Red Sox actually have…if you can believe this—I was shocked myself—over one thousand different applications that they’re running at any given time,” said Simon Taylor, founder and CEO of cloud security provider HYCU.

All that data needs protection from bad actors, which is why a recent partnership between the Boston Red Sox and cloud security provider HYCU could cause ransomware attacks against the iconic baseball team to strike out.

Taylor told IT Brew that the deal, announced in May, between the two Boston-based organizations allows the data-heavy business of baseball to protect its information.

“At a very high level, I can tell you that every baseball team, whoever it is, has an enormous amount of data they’re capturing on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis, and it’s not just the classic IT infrastructure data,” Taylor said. “The Red Sox have cataloged, managed, and they probably have an enormous amount of data that really provides a deep history of baseball as a sport, and is leveraged by the baseball team and franchise to support all of their ongoing daily activities.”

Head in the clouds. That means a lot of data in the cloud, which needs backing up and protecting. Brian Shield, Red Sox SVP and CTO, told MLB in May on announcement of the deal that because “the business of baseball is very complex,” the team needed to modernize its cloud capabilities.

“As our data protection needs continue to grow, we [need] a more effective way to protect our mission-critical data and HYCU has allowed us to do that,” Shield said.

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Data will be backed up to cloud storage company Wasabi via the HYCU Protégé DPaaS platform.

Cache and cash. Attackers are likely to target the Red Sox for a couple of reasons, Taylor told IT Brew. The organization is a money machine, yes, but there’s also the prestige that comes with a successful attack on an institution with huge brand recognition.

“An organization like the Boston Red Sox has cache and cash,” Taylor said.

It’s a real concern for IT leaders across the sports industry. At a panel at RSA 2023 on sports cyber threats, NHL CISO Dave Munroe described the attack surface that exists in arenas and around teams—and how that means security teams need to take care of everyone in the organization and the building.

“We have to really protect all of those people, even someone who’s doing payroll, or someone who’s in HR—they’re all part of the brand, they’re all an extension of the brand,” Munroe said at the time. “And we have to protect them as such.”

Pay up. Of particular concern is, of course, ransomware. As IT Brew has reported, attacks have increased across all industries over the past year, and sport is no exception—most notoriously in February 2022, when the San Francisco 49ers suffered an attack just before the Super Bowl.

Taylor told IT Brew that the question isn’t if a ransomware attack succeeds, but how to manage that attack when it happens. For companies like HYCU, that means making sure that data is encrypted and recoverable.

“Everything that HYCU does is fully encrypted; everything that HYCU builds is on a hardened Linux base, or code, so it’s not Windows,” Taylor said.

Top insights for IT pros

From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.