Consumers Energy has hired an outsourcer to take over some of its day-to-day IT operations, and it hopes the move will allow its own data center workers to focus on projects that directly impact its bottom line.

Microsoft on Thursday identified a Chinese security partner as the source of a leak last March in its highly restricted vulnerability information-sharing program.

Nissan Motor Co. and performance apparel maker Under Armor have disclosed recent data breaches involving the potential compromise of employee information.

Trouble Ticket

In a somewhat startling decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last week ruled that several employees at an executive recruitment firm did not exceed their authorized access to their company's database when they logged into the system and stole confidential data from it.

An in-class project on advanced search techniques led to the discovery of a major data breach at the University of Tampa (UT) in Florida earlier this month.

Trouble Ticket

Smartphones, tablets, social networks, and cloud services are all popular, incredibly useful -- and a security risk. These days, the security focus is on mobile devices, as they tend to be used a lot to work with corporate information, but the variety of platforms, the fact many are employee-owned, and uneven security capabilities all add up to a real -- sometimes impossible -- challenge to manage them in the same way as the corporate PC.

This past January, the health organisation Kaiser Permanente reported a theft of an external hard drive from an em­­ployee's car. The hard drive contained data on about 15,500 Northern California patients, including their full names, medical record numbers, and, in some cases, gender, dates of birth, and other info on treatment and care received at Kaiser (but not patients' social security numbers or financial data).

The inability to discard worthless items even though they appear to have no value is known as compulsive hoarding syndrome. Ben Rothke explains why it's a bad habit in the world of IT security.