SI Special Report: Why NFL Draft Season Is Ripe to Be Hacked

How might it happen? Or, perhaps, how did it happen? An unprecedented draft season left NFL teams relying on technology like never before, and—according to security experts and hackers—left them more vulnerable than they might have imagined.

Next week’s NFL Draft will be virtual.

With the facilities of all 32 teams closed due to COVID-19 concerns, general managers and scouts will work from home and be connected to one another – and the league officials – online.

It will be a unique environment and a showcase for the connectivity that exits in this modern world.

It also will be an enticing challenge for hackers who revel in their ability to use technology to create chaos. Sometimes on a small scale. Back in January, for example, the Chicago Bears’ official Twitter account was hacked by a group that wanted to show “everything is hackable.” Others are more significant, such as in October 2013, when credit card records for three million users and IDs and passwords for 15 million at Adobe were accessed by an outside party.

Thursday, Sports Illustrated’s MMQB looked deeper into how the NFL implemented the technology to conduct the 2020 NFL Draft as originally scheduled, Thursday through Saturday, and the likelihood that a motivated and capable hacker could crash the party.

“Imagine my goal is to hack a team" Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and now principal security researcher at Jamf, an Apple device management solution, told MMQB. "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."

The NFL said that its cybersecurity is “comprehensive and thoughtful” and that IT personnel from the league office have consulted with their counterparts from all 32 franchises. Ultimately, though, it is the responsibility of the teams to have their own systems in place for the draft.

To read the MMQB story about the possibility of the 2020 NFL Draft being hacked, click here.