How Identity Finder DLP Works

To effectively manage risk, it is necessary to have enterprise-wide visibility into your organization's areas of exposure and an inventory of vulnerable sensitive information. Further, a single initiative to find and protect insecure data is no longer enough. With Identity Finder Enterprise Suite, you can analyze sensitive information across your entire organization and centrally manage policies on distributed Identity Finder clients to continually track compliance to your requirements. Identity Finder Enterprise Suite arms managers with the intelligence they need to identify problem areas and prevent data leakage.

Despite all of the great security products available today, the number of data breaches continues to rise. More than a half billion personal records of U.S. residents have been exposed since 2005, and in 2010 alone approximately 11 million Americans were victims of identity fraud, an increase from 2009 by over 10%. It's time for a fresh approach.

Identity Finder introduces a new philosophy to data leakage prevention. Traditional approaches defend the border of an organization, trying to keep the bad guys out. If history has taught us anything, it is that hackers, viruses, malware, and others will always find a way onto our systems. To solve the data loss problem, Identity Finder goes to the source.

Identity Finder offers Businesses the strongest approach to data loss prevention on the market. Our software quickly and effectively finds sensitive data – data that can be anywhere and that most organizations do not even know still exists. Beyond identification, we offer remediation capabilities to clean this data. This way you reduce your risk exposure. If hackers or viruses get onto your system, you dramatically reduce the chances of them finding sensitive data and a data breach from ever occurring again.

Most people are unaware of the amount of sensitive information stored on their computer or the many locations it is saved. Identity Finder automates the discovery process by using its proprietary AnyFind technology to intelligently and automatically locate social security numbers, credit card numbers, patient health information, payment card industry data, bank accounts, passwords, driver's licenses, dates of birth, and other private information that can be used to commit identity fraud. By searching through files, e-mail messages/attachments, web browsers, system areas, databases, remote servers, websites, and more. Identity Finder searches wide and deep to uncover the information that puts you at risk. From a password that was e-mailed in clear text, to credit card numbers saved in a hidden columns within an Excel spreadsheet, to social security numbers in a table of your database, Identity Finder will find and validate the information before clearly showing you the location it was found, the sensitive data itself, and the complete context surrounding the identity match. For information on Identity Finder for Mac, please click here to see How it Works on Mac OS.

Identity Finder presents you numerous configuration options to tune a search for optimal performance within your environment. For example, if you want Identity Finder to find all instances of unformatted social security numbers as long as they match the definition of how the Social Security Administration has defined them, then the application can be tuned to do that. Alternatively, you can configure the software to only return results where a minimum number of unformatted social security numbers is found and near certain keywords but not near certain other keywords. Validation techniques and comprehensive rules are defined in Identity Finder's AnyFind definitions, which are updated monthly to keep them relevant and minimize false positives.

At the heart of Identity Finder is the Enterprise Client. The Enterprise Client can search remote machines for sensitive data without the need of a deployed agent. It provides remediation tools like shred and secure, and offers a graphical interface that users can interact with directly. IT Staff often search remote machines agentlessly using the Client. If end users are given the application, features can be enabled and disabled per organizational policy.

In addition to running the Client as a desktop application, it can also be scheduled and run as a backend service, completely silent to end-users. Organizations often deploy the client as a silent service to distribute processing loads. When running as a backend service, the Client typically reports into the Identity Finder Enterprise Console, which allows for reporting, scheduling, searching on demand, and full policy management.

The Identity Finder Enterprise Console is a single point of access for enterprise-wide reports and client configuration. Using the data from all Clients, administrators can create custom reports as driven by business need. In addition, IT staff can centrally manage policies of deployed Clients. For example, IT can configure a policy that performs a daily search for social security numbers, but they can also create another policy that searches monthly for credit card numbers. Viewing the results, organizations can understand where they have greatest risk from unsecured sensitive data and proactively work to reduce their exposure.


While finding sensitive information is a critical first step, you also need a comprehensive set of tools to protect that information. Identity Finder provides these tools and makes it simple to permanently shred, scrub clean, securely encrypt, or safely quarantine anything found during the search. By using the Results Wizard or Advanced Interface, you can quickly identity those items at risk, select an appropriate action to remove or protect the information and execute it with a single click. In addition to acting on search results, Identity Finder provides a wide range of tools to protect passwords, secure files inside encrypted file vaults, shred files and folders, and clean up and secure web browsers. For information on Identity Finder for Mac, click here to see How it Works on Mac OS.

Identities
Please see the feature comparison for details of which identities are available in each edition.

• Social Security Numbers
• Credit/Debit cards
• Passwords/PINs
• Bank account numbers
• Driver Licenses
• Dates of Birth
• Phone Numbers
• E-Mail Addresses
• Personal Addresses
• Passport Numbers
• Mother's Maiden Names
• National Insurance Numbers (United Kingdom)
• National Health Service Number (United Kingdom)
• Tax File Numbers (Australia)
• Social Insurance Numbers (Canada)
• Custom Types, Keywords and Patterns

Locations (Click here for Mac Edition)
Please see the feature comparison for details of which locations are available in each edition.

• Files and Compressed Files
  • My Computer
  • My Documents and Settings
  • Removable Drives
  • Custom Folders
• E-Mail Messages and Attachments
  • Outlook
  • Outlook Express and Windows Mail
  • Thunderbird
  • PST and MBOX mail files
• Web Browsers
  • Internet Explorer
  • Firefox
• Windows Registry

Actions (Click here for Mac Edition)
Please see the feature comparison for details of which actions are available in each edition.

• Shred
• Secure
• Scrub
• Quarantine