Thanks!

By running IdentityFinder and scanning your computer for SSNs and financial account numbers, you are helping the University identify where this sensitive information is located. More importantly, you are helping the University identify information that must be protected if it is still required by the business or securely destroyed if it is no longer required.

Destroying the old information that we no longer need and protecting the information that we still do need is an important step in protecting our the students, alumni, faculty and staff.

Windows

• Click here for a walkthrough on running IdentityFinder on Windows.

Mac OS X

• Click here for a walkthrough on running IdentityFinder on Mac OS X.

Tips / Frequently Asked Questions

Here are a few suggestions to keep in mind when you are scanning your computer:

• How long will it take? It depends on how much data you have, and on whether you choose to run a quick scan or a thorough scan.
• Why so many false positives? Tufts University takes its responsibility to protect this information seriously. As such, we search for files that contain only one potential SSN or financial account record. This allows us to detect a directory that may contain 100 files, each containing files that only have a single SSN.
  The good news is that once you "Ignore the location" of the false positives, they will not appear in future scans. Windows and Mac walkthrough documents now contain tips on how to minimize false positives prior to running a scan.
• What if it finds SSNs in e-mail? Due to a high risk of mailbox corruption, shredding messages in Thunderbird and in mbox files is disabled. This issue, which is seen in Thunderbird and Eudora, is fairly common among applications that scan email (including some anti-virus tools) and relates to how these applications interact with MBOX files and folders. Outlook users are not affected. For Thunderbird and other mail clients that create MBOX files and folders, IdentityFinder's recommendation is to identify the message within the mail client itself and manually delete that message. To do this in Thunderbird, locate the individual message in the local folder and delete it, empty the Trash folder, and then compact your mail folders (File->Compact Folders).
• How should I scan a shared or previously-owned computer? If you have a computer that is shared among several users, or was primarily used by someone else, it may have files on it to which your account doesn't have access. IdentityFinder scans use the access rights of your user account, so you may need to run IdentityFinder as an administrator account in order to scan these other files. Alternatively, your group can set up an IdentityFinder console server, which will provide central reporting and scheduled scanning of the computer with system-level privileges.