Cashman: Yankees have added data security

MIAMI -- When internal information of the Houston Astros was hacked and leaked last June, the Yankees took measures to ensure the same didn't happen to their organization.

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General manager Brian Cashman shed some light on those measures prior to Tuesday night's game against the Marlins.

A report circulated on Tuesday morning about the FBI and Justice Department investigating the St. Louis Cardinals for allegedly obtaining unauthorized access to Houston's computer system. Cashman, calling the Astros' personnel "intelligent people," thought everybody would go through the process of researching vulnerabilities to prevent a breach. He made the final call concerning steps the Yankees made to feel more secure.

When an employee leaves, for example, his/her access gets shut down and the equipment is captured. Still, as Cashman put it, "You can't take what people know."

"We certainly added some more measures, spent more money to protect what's privileged," Cashman said. "It's more inconvenient now for us to access our stuff, but we did it -- again -- to look for where those vulnerabilities were and made some adjustments and spent some more money to upgrade the process."

Was it done for precautionary reasons?

"We have not been compromised, but again you try to stay ahead of everything to the best of your abilities," Cashman said. "But you recognize, too, there's some pretty sophisticated, intelligent people that if they want to do some terrible things there's only so much you can do to protect yourself. If you get someone looking to do harm and spend the time and effort and money and aggravation to put themselves in harm's way, I guess anybody in the planet would be vulnerable.

"There were some extra steps. Were they necessary? We'll never know, but we're more secure by doing so. We felt secure before, but we made it more difficult now. It's a little more inconvenience when we're accessing our system ourselves, but we spent some more money to add some further measures, regardless. There were grumblings by employees at the front end of it, because to access our system it's more difficult now for all of us to do so, but we're better protected by the way we went about it."

Asked whether accessing that type of information was part of the natural evolution of statistical analysis and gaining an advantage, Cashman disagreed.

"What happened to Houston last year ... is not natural," Cashman said. "I would just say that. That's not natural no matter what business you're in. It's an illegal act."