New website EUR ‘safer and more accessible’

Better accessible on mobile, tablet and for visually impaired people, more structured information and hopefully safer. However, some information has been removed from the new website of the Erasmus University, which is officially presented on Monday 11 December.

The site is officially live from 10.00 am. According to Geke Koppenol of the project team, the migration has been succesfully completed. “There may be some hyperlinks missing here and there, or some typing errors. All departments of the university are working hard on this today. Besides those minor issues, everything should work properly. “If people still have problems loading the site, Koppenol recommends refreshing the page with CTRL-F5.

Hack

That the new website is safer than the previous one is a prerequisite. The old one was hacked in November 2016, when the hackers had access to personal data of 17,000 people. That this hack was possible was mainly due to the use of an outdated version of the content management system Typo3. That is now being replaced by Drupal, a system that should be easier to keep up-to-date.

Another safety measure taken is that a lot of information is simply no longer stored on the public site. On the old site, completed forms were stored on the public web server for an indefinite period of time. Amongst these forms were requests for interviews with student psychologists, for example. This is no longer happening, so this sensitive information can no longer be hacked. Information pages that are only relevant for employees and students have been moved to the MyEUR intranet.

Wrapper

To promote the launch of the new site, staff and students were offered a chocolate bar on Monday. In one of the bars there is a golden wrapper. That wrapper does not give the finder a trip to the chocolate factory, but a brand new mobile phone.

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