Step 1: About Identity Finder
Identity Finder assists you in preventing identity theft by finding Personally Identifiable Information stored on your computer, file shares or external media and providing you with the ability to easily and quickly protect or securely dispose of it.
What is Personally Identifiable Information?
Personally identifiable information (PII) is any piece of information which can potentially be used to uniquely identify, contact or locate a single person. PII is generally kept private and often used for financial, medical or research identification. Examples of PII include Social Security Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, Bank Account Numbers, Driver’s License Numbers and account passwords.
Why Clean Up PII?
If your computer or external media is lost, stolen or broken into over the network, sensitive PII may be harvested from your compromised equipment. A surprising amount of sensitive PII (e.g. your passwords, credit card numbers, and maybe even Social Security Number) may be retained on your computer just from daily use along with sensitive PII stored in personal and work files. This information can be used to steal not only your money and identity, but also the money and identities of anyone else who either shares your computer or whose sensitive PII you store for Carnegie Mellon work. And if you do store sensitive PII for Carnegie Mellon work, the University would be obligated under PA state law to notify everyone affected by the breach and could potentially be legally liable.
You might think this could never happen to you, but consider these facts:
- Laptop losses totaled $6.7 million for 2005 -- 2005 Computer Security Institute/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey
- 1 out of every 8 to 15 laptops were lost or stolen over the last few years
- The Carnegie Mellon network sees over 700,000 cyber attacks per day
- PII breach notifications were sent for two lost Carnegie Mellon laptop incidents within the last year and a half
- Over eight million Americans have their identities stolen annually -- Federal Trade Commission
- 85% of identity theft victims find out about identity theft through an adverse action such as a loan or employment denial and the average identity theft victim will have to spend 600 hours clearing his or her good name -- Identity Theft Resource Center
Invest the time now to clean PII from your machine and help prevent Identity Theft for yourself, for everyone who shares your computer and for everyone whose data you handle.
Why Can't Computing Services do This for Me?
Although your departmental computing administrator or DSP consultant may install software and help you with the clean up process, you must ultimately decided what files to securely delete or securely retain given your duties and needs. Additionally, the PII searching software will find sensitive PII such as passwords and financial account numbers that you should keep private even from your computing support personnel.
How Do I Clean Up PII on Windows Machines?
Follow the steps provided in this document to install and run Identity Finder.
Faculty and staff members: Please complete a PII Clean Up Worksheet for each computer you clean while you are in the process of cleaning it. These worksheets are the only mechanism we have for measuring the effectiveness of the software and improving the PII clean up process. Please take the time to provide us with this much needed feedback.
Steps for Cleanup
- READ introduction material on this page
- Download and Install Identity Finder
- REVIEW the Worksheet (Faculty and Staff ONLY)
- Configure and Run an Identity Finder Search
- Manage Your Search Results
- Choose how to clean each search result
- Rerun Identity Finder for additional external storage or shared folders
- CLEAN files that you KNOW contain PII but Identity Finder missed (Identity Finder may not recognize certain custom file formats)
- Schedule Re-runs so that you remember to run Identity Finder regularly (e.g., weekly, monthly).
- SUBMIT the Worksheet to ISO (Faculty and Staff ONLY)
Last Updated: 4/23/08
