For the Red Sox, defense means getting in-house and outside solutions on the field

“It’s only a matter of time before an attacker attaches an explosive payload to a drone and drops it in the stands,” Red Sox VP of Technology Operations and Information Security Randy George said. “And I’m really frankly surprised it hasn’t happened at a major sporting venue yet.”

George’s comments came during an April 17 presentation when the team and intelligence security firm Centripetal officially announced their partnership. IT Brew reported on the deal in March, noting that the Red Sox need protection from threats against any number of activities, including e-commerce, ticketing, and private data.

“Enterprises are in that position where they’re at this fork in the road; the status quo isn’t going to work,” Centripetal COO Jonathan Rogers told the crowd at the event.

Team sport. Added help is essential. IT Brew reported in August 2023 about cloud security provider HYCU’s partnership with the Boston baseball team to protect its data. Simon Taylor, founder and CEO of HYCU, told IT Brew at the time that the sport lends itself to high amounts of data that need to be secured.

“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.

George’s team only employs one full-time cybersecurity expert—she has two interns to assist her, George said—and “half of her day is spent just with platform administration.”

“Identity management, for a business this size, consumes a ton of cycles,” George said. “Training employees, looking for threats, fixing security-related platform problems—that’s probably 50% to 75% of the day; we don’t have the time to be constantly threat hunting.”

In an interview following the Centripetal presentation, George told IT Brew that his team also needs to manage a number of regulations and restrictions related to custodianship of medical records and data privacy.

Luckily, MLB picks up some of the slack on players’ health records and e-commerce; Centripetal and 15 other cybersecurity vendors help with managing threats. Cyber insurance has driven the change in prioritizing IT, George said, with many companies outright saying they require MFA-enabled systems.

Playing the umps. When it comes to the aforementioned drone threat, the concern is driven by a feeling that should be familiar to IT professionals—a need to control the threat landscape, and frustration over hurdles in the way of proper management.

“The regulatory framework that allows us to interdict a drone, say, doesn’t exist today,” George said. “There’s pending legislation out there and we’ve been lobbying to get it over the finish line.”