Cornell University, Developer of Spider, Adds Identity Finder to its Privacy Data Toolkit

NEW YORK, NY – May 26, 2009 – Data leakage and exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) are known and growing problems. More than 260 million personal records of U.S. residents have been exposed since 2005, and in 2008 alone 10 million Americans were victims of identity fraud, an increase from 2007 by over 20%. To combat this issue, forward thinking organizations have been attacking the root cause of data loss by finding unprotected sensitive data and securing it. Despite the prevalence of freely available tools, many organizations are investing in the commercial application Identity Finder (www.identityfinder.com) to help them protect sensitive data.


Cornell University, developer of Cornell Spider, one of the leading freely available tools, recently purchased Identity Finder. Steve Schuster, Cornell University's Director of IT Security said, "Cornell is committed to taking all steps practicable to protect the private data of our community members. An extremely important step toward this goal is the inventory and potentially subsequent removal of private data on computer systems. We believe offering and supporting a set of tools to accomplish this task best serve our university. Cornell has added Identity Finder to its toolkit to help inventory and protect private data."


A strong data loss prevention solution involves people, process, and technology. But when technology is difficult to use the costs for people and process dramatically increase. “Identity Finder’s goal has always been to reduce overall total cost of ownership” said Todd Feinman, CEO of Identity Finder. “Identity Finder differentiates itself in the marketplace by helping organizations improve processes to find a wide array of sensitive information, remediate unprotected PII, and centrally manage their deployment.”


Other institutions are following suit. Tom Davis, Chief Information Security Officer at Indiana University said, "We chose Identity Finder because it offers us the greatest ability to not only find personal information at the source, but also easily and quickly clean our systems so that we are confident those data won't leak outside the university. The constant improvements, ease of use, and accuracy make Identity Finder more compelling than trying to develop our own solution or using open source tools."


University of Virginia’s Marty Peterman also had the following to say, “Identity Finder has been a critical component in our efforts to secure confidential data. The reports make it easy to identify and secure sensitive data. We have been using the Enterprise Edition for close to a year and plan to roll out the Mac Edition any day.”


Identity Finder lets users find sensitive information on their computers by searching files, e-mails, and other system areas. Administrators can run it on desktops, servers, databases, websites, and other remote machines. After identifying confidential data, Identity Finder presents these matches to users and lets them clean the data by securely shredding, redacting, encrypting, or using a number of other remediation features. The enterprise application is appropriate for IT administrators and end users alike.


Working in conjunction with the Identity Finder Client is Management Console, which produces detailed enterprise-wide and executive summary reports. Managers are then armed with the necessary information they need to identify problem areas within their organization and assess the impact of their policies.