Identity Finder Professional 4: Protecting What's Important on Your PC Digging for Your Sensitive Data with Identity Finder Joseph Moran
Given how integral they've become to daily life, it should come as no surprise that the typical personal or business computer is a treasure trove of sensitive personal information. Should a system be accessed without authorization — infected by malware, for example — that data can be stolen and used to perpetrate identity theft.
This scenario can have serious consequences not only for the person whose information is at risk of being compromised but also for any small business that may be subject to regulations regarding the privacy of employee or customer records.
Unearthing all the personal data lurking on a computer would seem a daunting proposition, but Identity Finder's same-name software makes the task quite manageable. Identity Finder Professional 4 ($34.95 for Windows Vista/XP/2000) will scan your system for myriad forms of at-risk data and then provide you with options to redress it.
Digging for Data
Navigating Identity Finder is done via a straightforward ribbon-style interface that will be familiar to anyone that's used Microsoft Office 2007. In many cases, you'll be able to take advantage of the program's well-designed search wizard to streamline the process of defining and conducting a reasonably thorough search without getting bogged down by too many configuration options.
Identity Finder can hunt for a host of information types ranging from highly intimate bits like Social Security, credit card, or bank account numbers to more casual ones such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and dates of birth.
To keep you from drowning in endless irrelevant results, an OnlyFind option lets you limit searches for certain items to one or more specific pieces of info — a particular phone number or address of interest, for example. Though you can't do it from the wizard, Identity Finder also lets you search for custom pieces of information by keyword.
After you've decided what to look for, you tell Identity Finder where you want to look. You can choose to scan only the current user's documents and settings, a specific folder, or the entire system (including removable drives, but not network folders). The software can dig through files (including compressed ones), Internet Explorer and Firefox browser data, the Windows Registry, and POP e-mail messages (plus attachments, contact, and calendar entries) for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird.
Identity Finder's scan of our test system, which we limited to the My Documents folder, took around a half-hour (more comprehensive searches can take significantly longer) and produced a list of 522 identity matches. The software found a diverse mix of items, including credit card numbers embedded within browser forms, passwords contained in e-mail messages (lots and lots of those), account numbers from bank statements, and social security numbers listed on saved tax returns.
For each match, Identity Finder reports the specific personal information it found alongside the file type and location, and a preview pane lets you view an item's offending data within the context of the entire document without having to open the application used to create it.
Identity Finder does a pretty good job of discerning truly sensitive information from that which merely appears to be. Although it naturally looks at the ostensible signs that data is sensitive (e.g. anything following the words "username" or "password" is a no-brainer), when appropriate its detection algorithm checks what it finds against a database of data types. As a result, it doesn't automatically assume that a 16-digit number is a credit card number or that a nine-digit one formatted as xxx-xx-xxxx is necessarily a Social Security ID.
Of the five hundred-plus matches Identity Finder found on our system, around a dozen could be considered "false positives." These mainly involved vendor account numbers (e.g. FedEx, UPS, various stores) misidentified as bank or Social Security account numbers. When we tried to trip up the software by placing conspicuously labeled but made-up Social Security and credit card numbers alongside real ones inside several documents, Identity Finder always flagged the real numbers but ignored the ersatz ones.
