Experts: Tough to prove broker malice in Series tix sales

Alan Gathright and Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 26, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Local News

Computer experts say proving criminal intent could be difficult in the FBI's investigation into what the Colorado Rockies called an "external malicious attack" on the baseball team's World Series ticketing system.

Ticket brokers' automated software, suspected of causing the online system to crash, shouldn't be classified as malicious, said Chris Benham, vice president of corporate marketing at Webroot Software Inc., a Boulder company that sells a popular anti-spyware program.

"By our definition, malicious is the intent to prevent a site from being functional, not the intent to get an upper hand (in buying tickets)," Benham said.

The FBI has launched a probe into how the Rockies' online system was paralyzed when tickets went on sale Monday, angering thousands of fans.

"We are going to be opening up a case looking into the possible compromise of the Web server" system that was swamped during the online sale, said Laura Eimiller, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles FBI office. The FBI's cyber crime squad will review the incident.

Major League Baseball officials have acknowledged that the Rockies were referring to brokers with ticket-grabbing automated software, not hackers, when they called the attack malicious.

Several technology experts say the system may have crashed because it was too poorly designed to handle the flood of buyers, especially the brokers.

The Rockies' said its online ticket system provider, Paciolan Inc. of Irvine, Calif., was "overwhelmed" by 8.5 million computer hits in the first 90 minutes of sales.

This forced the Rockies to postpone online sales until Tuesday, when the almost 60,000 series tickets sold out in 2 1/2 hours.

Rockies spokesman Jay Alves confirmed that team management filed the complaint with the FBI.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News