Technology Advisory Group

Today’s IT Forum with trainer Jack Williams was all about Identity Finder. What faculty need to know:

• Sometime next week, KBOX will push out a new program to your computer called Identity Finder.
• Identity Finder is a software tool that scans your computer for unsecured Personally Identifiable Information (PII).  It looks for things like Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, passwords, etc (full list here) using pattern recognition and contextual analysis.
• While the program will be automatically installed by KBOX, it won’t run automatically – so you can choose when you want to run it.  Jack recommends running it once each quarter.
• When you do start the program, it will scan all of the files saved on your computer (including any email and email attachments that you have saved locally) and search for PII.  Jack noted that the scan can take a long time (average 3.5 hours), but you can run it in the background as you do other work.
• At the end of the scan, Identity Finder will show you a list of any information it has identified as potential PII.  You can then review that report and decide how to act on each item. Options are to “shred” (delete completely from your machine), “scrub” (redact the sensitive information from the document), “secure” (password-protect the file), “quarantine” (save to a secure location, i.e. a folder on RoyalDrive), “recycle” (send to recycling bin), or “ignore” (for false positives – the file will be ignored in future Identity Finder scans).  If Identity Finder picks up PII in a Thunderbird email file, Jack recommends deleting it by going through Thunderbird rather than through Identity Finder.
• You’re the only person who can review your scan results (there’s no automatic reporting back to IR, for example). When the scan is complete, Identity Finder sends a brief report back to a central management server indicating what PII has been found and what PC it is on.  It does not allow that central server to access the actual files on your machine.  The only people who can access that central server are the staff of the Information Security Office, and they will review Identity Finder reports from a University machine only in two situations: 1) if the security of a machine has been breached, or 2) if the head of a department or area requests the reports to validate the security of machines in their area.
• Step-by-step instructions will be available here.  Jack has also posted basic and detailed instruction guides (PDF).

Please pass the word along to your fellow faculty members so that no one’s caught off guard next week, and let me know if there are any questions. Thanks!

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Updated 5/6/11 with correction from Jim regarding reporting