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Can't find the net: about Manchester United's new entanglement

The hacking of Manchester United's computers is just another chapter in the new and unfamiliar struggle of sports clubs: cyber wars.

When Liverpool broke into Manchester City's computers it ended in £ 1m in compensation. The Red Devils seemed to be happy with such a fine

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• Manchester United

Yotam Gutman

Sunday, November 29, 2020, 12:30 p.m.

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Manchester United are the latest in a string of clubs and sports organizations to lose to a new and unfamiliar opponent - cybercriminals.

Last Friday, the club announced that hackers had hacked into the organization's IT systems.

At first there was concern that the break-in would affect the ability to hold games at Old Trafford's stadium.

This fear was refuted, and the day after the break-in, the game against West Bromwich Albion (0: 1) took place as planned.

That does not end the story.

Manchester appears to have suffered a ransomware attack that encrypted vital information, and may have even leaked it out of the organization.

The organization's information systems are not yet serviceable and its employees cannot, for example, use the corporate email.

It now also appears that the attackers are demanding a ransom of millions of pounds in order to recover the stolen or encrypted information and the British cyber authority is involved in investigating the case. It should be noted, by the way, that this was not the only cyber event in the weekend. 90,000 of his friends were stolen.

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Got tangled up fairly.

Ed Woodward (Photo: AP)

This, of course, is not the first time a team in the Premier League has suffered a ransom attack.

The British Cyber ​​Authority, NCSC, announced last July that a second-division football team had suffered a ransom attack that paralyzed security cameras and turnstiles at the entrance to its pitch, an action that nearly caused it to cancel a league game.

Additional groups were hit by attacks of other types - Liverpool suffered in 2018 an attack in which details of several hundred subscribers were stolen.

In another case, the details of which remained confidential, hackers hacked into e-mail boxes and interfered in negotiations between a Premier League club and a player's agent, and by impersonating an agent almost caused the club to transfer £ 1m to their account.

Most of the attacks are carried out on a financial background, in an attempt to steal, extort or defraud these organizations.

In general, sports teams and organizations seem to be preferred targets for hackers.

A study published this year regarding cyber threats against sports teams shows that about 70% of sports organizations in the UK suffer from cyber attacks every year, about twice the normal average in the economy.

When examining in depth the structure of those organizations the reasons for this become clearer.

Sports clubs and organizations are large, rich and high-profile organizations.

They hold large amounts of valuable information - details of tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of fans who are members of various clubs, as well as very sensitive information - medical information of players worth millions, information on transfers and acquisitions and more.

This is especially true of information regarding scouting, the same extensive array that groups operate in order to locate the rising talents, acquire them at a young age, improve them and sell them at a handsome profit.

The economic incentive is so great that sometimes sports teams are the ones breaking into other sports teams in order to achieve it.

This seems to have happened in 2013, when hackers on behalf of Liverpool broke into the Scout7 scouting platform and accessed the accounts of rival team Manchester City, who were then busy signing Fernandinho and Jose Navas, for a total of £ 54 million. The full details are unknown. However, it was reported that the teams compromised outside the court walls and Liverpool paid City £ 1m in compensation, which, no matter how serious, dwarfs what happened to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, whose scouting team leader Chris Corre, entered the systems of arch-rival Joston Astros has nearly 50 times over a period of two and a half years, in an attempt to learn about the scouting system and its tactics.Federal court sent Corra to 46 months in prison, and in addition the league management kept him out of a lifetime baseball and fined his team two. Million, which was transferred to Astros as compensation.

Sometimes sports teams are the ones that break into other teams (Photo: ShutterStock)

Sometimes the motive for the attacks is completely different - like an attack on the cloud accounts of athletics in the UK, which led to the hacking and publication of their intimate photos last week.

This case takes advantage of the publicity that athletes receive for the purpose of weeping on social media (a ransom payment may also be required to prevent the distribution of additional photos).

Sometimes the motives have nothing to do with sports, or money.

International sporting events are a source of prestige and national pride.

Disruption of such an event can cause great embarrassment and even a diplomatic incident.

It was recently reported that Russia has sought to disrupt the Olympic Games that were to be held in Tokyo this year.

The Russians are working aggressively against Olympic events and against the World War II Drugs Agency (WADA), which disqualified Russia from participating in international sports competitions for 4 years due to drug use.

The Russians have already practiced their offensive cyber capabilities against the Winter Olympics held in Korea two years ago, disguised as North Korean and Chinese officials and trying to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Games.

The fear is that they have tried to carry out similar attacks against the postponed Olympics.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raeb said in an interview that the attacks of the Russian army's cyber units against the Olympics are "both dangerous and cynical and we condemn them outright."

These incidents illustrate well the variety of threats facing financially motivated sports organizations - hackers, rival clubs and even countries.

Presumably the high profile of those organizations and the fact that millions of people are closely following players and clubs, and willing to pay a lot of money to watch their idol on the field only intensifies the motivation of hackers, and that we are likely to experience many more cyber-related sporting events. 

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