March 2003

UM earns award for paper
about Web security breach
An academic paper about UM's response to accidental posting of confidential information on its Internet server has earned its authors the 2003 CUMREC New Horizon Grant.

CUMREC, formally known as the College and University Computer Users Association, presents an annual national conference for information technology professionals in higher education.

CUMREC awarded the grant to Ray Ford, UM associate vice president for information technology, and Martha Burtis, director of Web development.

Gordy Pace, director of multimedia applications in the Information Technology Office, co-authored a companion paper, which he and Ford initially presented in October 2002 at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Atlanta.

EDUCAUSE, an affiliate of CUMREC, is an organization devoted to the use of information technology in higher education.

The paper, "Inadvertent Web Postings: Public Relations Disaster Recovery," looks at UM's response to and lessons learned from the Web security breach of November 2001, when children's confidential mental health records were discovered on UM's Web site.

A subsequent investigation revealed that the text files had been inadvertently uploaded to the server, where they were automatically indexed and then revealed by UM's search engine. UM removed the files immediately upon being notified of their existence by news media, but the event was widely reported from the Missoulian to the Los Angeles Times.

The original paper was so well-received at EDUCAUSE that Ford and Burtis were invited to submit a follow-up paper for the upcoming CUMREC conference.

With receipt of the New Horizon Grant, Ford and Burtis will receive complimentary registrations for the conference, to be held May 11-14 at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. They'll also receive a $600 grant, and their paper and presentation materials will be placed in the EDUCAUSE resource library.

University Relations | Cary Shimek, Editor
The University of Montana-Missoula
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