http://www.mckeay.net/2008/06/25/scan-your-drive-for-pii/ The views of one man on security, privacy and anything else that catches his attention Sat, 20 Mar 2010 10:00:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 http://www.mckeay.net/2008/06/25/scan-your-drive-for-pii/comment-page-1/#comment-2344 Justin Klein Keane Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:39:14 +0000 http://www.mckeay.net/2008/06/25/scan-your-drive-for-pii/#comment-2344 We did an extensive evaluation of PII discovery tools, including several open source tools such as University of Texas' SENF and Cornell's Spider but found that all of them turned up way too many false positives to be useful for most users. Imagine the 63 false positives you got multiplied by the number of folders in your C: drive. We wanted users to be able to pull up PII in cache files and stowed AIM conversations so we couldn't just limit them to the 'My Documents' folder. In our evaluation we actually found that IdentityFinder was pretty amazing software. They're an up and coming player in the PII space and have yet to get swallowed up by the big anti-virus companies so they're still really receptive to customer feedback. The IdentityFinder tool found fewer false positives and presented users with a much easier to use interface. It also includes options to securely shred or encrypt the material that it does find. Although it isn't free at $20 IdentityFinder is certainly worth the investment given the harm that lost PII could cause. We did an extensive evaluation of PII discovery tools, including several open source tools such as University of Texas’ SENF and Cornell’s Spider but found that all of them turned up way too many false positives to be useful for most users. Imagine the 63 false positives you got multiplied by the number of folders in your C: drive. We wanted users to be able to pull up PII in cache files and stowed AIM conversations so we couldn’t just limit them to the ‘My Documents’ folder. In our evaluation we actually found that IdentityFinder was pretty amazing software. They’re an up and coming player in the PII space and have yet to get swallowed up by the big anti-virus companies so they’re still really receptive to customer feedback. The IdentityFinder tool found fewer false positives and presented users with a much easier to use interface. It also includes options to securely shred or encrypt the material that it does find. Although it isn’t free at $20 IdentityFinder is certainly worth the investment given the harm that lost PII could cause.

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