Baseball exec. who hacked rival team sentenced – The Hill

The former St. Louis Cardinals employee who illegally accessed Houston Astros computers was sentenced to prison. 

Christopher Correa, a 36-year-old former director of baseball development for the Cardinals Major League Baseball team, was sentenced to 46 months in prison. 

Correa pleaded guilty Jan. 8 to five counts of unauthorized access to a computer.  

Correa first accessed email and internal research of the rival squad in part through an unfortunate coincidence; a former employee turned in a team-owned laptop along with its password and used a variant of that password with his new employers, the Astros. 

Though the Astros updated security practices after Correa first logged on, he was able to parlay his access to an employee email account into new passwords. 

Said a Department of Justice press release, Correa attempted to apologize at the sentencing and pass his behavior off as reckless, but the judge took issue with that description of the crime.

“No,” the press release quoted U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes. “You intentionally and knowingly did these acts.”