Some 9,000 students and 500 staff at the University of Colorado at Boulder recently were notified that their personal data housed on one of the university's computers may have been breached. A week later, the university declared it a false alarm. The problem was caused by an interaction between two incompatible software programs that mimicked behavior consistent with a malicious file, says the university's IT department.

When this behavior was first discovered, the university erred on the side of caution and notified the students and staff involved who then must have spent an anxious week or so wondering if their personal identity information, such as their Social Security numbers, were going to show up in the hands of ID thieves.

The university intends to beef up its security procedures including cleaning up computers that still may contain sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers. Read more here.