Loerie Awards comments on partial results leak
The Loerie Awards confirmed today, Wednesday, 1 August 2007, that there had been a partial leak of certain award results in the run up to the festival weekend. According to a press statement, the results were not released on the Loeries website, but were captured through a Google indexing process and could be viewed via a cache of information stored on Google's website. This was a direct result of a software error.
There was never any problem with the hosting of the website (a separate service provider), and there was never an issue that the data was vulnerable to attack by a hacker, continues the statement. Only entries from the Advertising category were affected. No data was available for the Design, Experiential, Integrated Campaign and Student categories. Once the error was detected, it was immediately dealt with and the data was removed from Google's website (with Google's direct assistance).
Says Andrew Human, MD of The Loerie Awards, “We will certainly be taking steps with all our suppliers to ensure that there is not a repeat of this. While I take this issue very seriously, I want to stress that the actual integrity of the judging and awards process was never compromised. The Loeries rewards the best work of the year, and while some data was leaked, this did not alter the fact that the most deserving work was awarded the industry's highest accolade.”
