FBI Investigates Cyber Attack on Rockies

By Alfred Branch, Jr.

The Colorado Rockies may have been swept out of the World Series by the Boston Red Sox over the weekend, but they’re still playing in the justice game.

Early last week, the team’s online World Series ticketing operation was hacked and by the end of the week, the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations had opened an investigation into the cyber crime. The Rockies were using servers and a system by ticketing solutions company Paciolan.

Laura Eimiller, spokesperson for the FBI’s Los Angeles bureau, confirmed for TicketNews that an investigation was opened in relation to the incident, but she could not offer many details.

“The bureau is investigating whether this was an intentional or deliberate intrusion, or whether it was a system malfunction, and determine who’s responsible,” she said, adding that while the L.A. office has investigated other cyber crimes, such as “denial of service” cases where a competing company may launch a computer-based attack on another company, this is the first time to her knowledge that the L.A. office was involved in a cyber investigation concerning the ticketing industry.

Shaw Taylor, spokesperson for Paciolan, did not return a call seeking comment, but according to published reports, the company blamed last week’s attack on software “bots” that jammed the system with more than 8.5 million hits in the first 90 minutes after tickets became available, at which time Paciolan voluntarily shut off the system because it allegedly couldn’t determine which were legitimate ticket requests and which ones were not.