Former Michigan assistant football coach indicted for stealing athlete’s private data

A former assistant coach for the University of Michigan football program has been charged with hacking into student-athlete databases at more than 100 colleges across the country.

The Justice Department charged 42-year-old Matthew Weiss, a former co-offensive coordinator for the Wolverines, with computer-hacking-related crimes that involved downloading data about more than 150,000 student-athletes.

A recent story from MSN.com detailed Weiss’s actions and how he carried out the cyber attack. Below is an excerpt from the MSN.com story.

Allegedly, Weiss then used the stolen data to help him break into the social media, email, and cloud storage accounts belonging to over 2,000 athletes. “Weiss primarily targeted female college athletes,” reads the 15-page indictment. “He researched and targeted these women based on their school affiliation, athletic history, and physical characteristics. His goal was to obtain private photographs and videos never intended to be shared beyond intimate partners.”

Federal investigators say Weiss conducted the hacking activities from 2015 to January 2023, when he was put on leave from the football team as campus police began to investigate the suspected computing-hacking crimes.

Weiss conducted the hacks by first targeting a third-party vendor, Keffer Development Services. It operates the Athletic Trainer System, which stores medical information on student-athletes. “Weiss obtained access to these databases through compromising the passwords of accounts with elevated levels of access, such as the accounts of trainers and athletic directors,” the indictment says.

He was also able to download the passwords that the athletes themselves used to access the Athletic Trainer System. The downloaded passwords were encrypted but Weiss decrypted them by researching how to do so on the internet, the indictment says.

“Using the combined information that he obtained from the student-athlete databases and his internet research, Weiss was able to obtain access to the social media, email, and/or cloud storage accounts of more than 2,000 targeted athletes by guessing or resetting their passwords,” the court document adds.

To read the full article from MSN.com about the former Michigan football assistant coach, click here. 

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