“At this point, it is our belief that the deletion was inadvertent.” – UWM’s Chief Information Officer Bruce Maas

Campus administrators are still investigating an incident in which over 40,000 files were deleted from the Secretary of the University’s computer last week.

A final report on the issue is expected to be released late next week, with a preliminary analysis that an authorized person made “an honest mistake.”

“At this point, it is our belief that the deletion was inadvertent. It looks as though someone who was working too fast simply made a mistake,” said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chief Information Officer Bruce Maas.

About a dozen university officials had access to those files, along with two or three technical support staff members.

While nothing has officially been ruled out, it appears unlikely that there was any foul play involved in the incident.

“There has been no evidence whatsoever that a hacker was involved,” said Maas.

The Pantherfile system was most directly affected by the file loss. Several units on campus utilize Pantherfile as an archive system, in which they store university policy and administrative documents. Only the files pertaining to the university secretary’s computer were deleted.

All of the files that were lost have been recovered using the system’s disaster recovery procedures, which Maas called a very challenging process. It took about a week to finally recover everything lost in the erasure.

The focus of the investigation is to discover how exactly the files were erased, and what can be done to eliminate this kind of mistake in the future.

“We aren’t looking to assess blame right now. We need to figure out just how this happened and work towards strengthening procedure so that we can prevent a similar situation,” said Maas.

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