Hacking the NFL Draft

How might it happen? Or, perhaps, how did it happen? An unprecedented draft season left NFL teams more vulnerable than they might have imagined.

On Thursday night, Roger Goodell, from a bunker in Westchester County, will put the Bengals on the clock. Green Bay Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst will be at his home rather than the draft room at Lambeau Field. He'll be alone rather than surrounded by scouts and coaches.

Sports Illustrated's Gary Gramling examined the challenges and dangers of the safe-at-home drafts.

To get to this point, the league and its teams have scrambled to build a virtual draft infrastructure, just as they’ve done all draft season to keep team personnel connected under stay-at-home guidelines. The scale and ambition of the operation is impressive. 

But as the pandemic has made videoconferencing and virtual connectivity an absolute necessity in all walks of life, hackers have taken advantage. Now consider the combination of 1) a billion-dollar corporation 2) an unprecedented undertaking and 3) a cast of thousands of less-than-tech-savvy users. Altogether, it means the NFL will, almost undoubtedly, be targeted.

“Imagine my goal is to hack a team" says Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and now principal security researcher at Jamf, an Apple device management solution. "There’s now a whole new remotely accessible system that was put together quite rapidly, which handles a lot of sensitive information. To me, that's an intriguing new attack surface."

As we approach the culmination of an unprecedented draft season, I spoke to security experts and hackers about this past month. So, pull on your Guy Fawkes mask—or whatever; your kid’s Iron Man mask from Halloween will do just fine—and open your mind to just the slightest bit of roguishness. This is how the NFL draft could be hacked. Or, maybe, how it already has been.

CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF GARY GRAMLING’S STORY.