Revision as of 11:31, 2 April 2012

Protecting sensitive information is important to Virginia Tech and ECE. Virginia Tech’s Standard for Storing and Transmitting Personally Identifying Information defines 7 data elements that must be protected with encryption when kept on your computer.

• Social security number
• Bank account numbers
• Driver’s license numbers
• Credit card numbers
• Debit card numbers
• Passport numbers
• Date of Birth in the same document as first and last name

Finding these data elements can be challenging. To help find this sensitive information, Virginia Tech has purchased a site license for Identity Finder. Identity Finder is commercial software that searches for sensitive data such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and a variety of other data elements. It is a powerful tool that faculty and staff can use to find sensitive data on their Virginia Tech owned machines and storage. For more information on the VT Policies for securely storing and using sensitive data, please see the following:

• http://www.security.vt.edu/sensitiveinfo.html
• VT Policy for Standard for Storing and Transmitting Personally Identifying Information
• VT Security Standards for Social Security Numbers

The Bradley Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering encourages using Identity Finder to find any sensitive information on your computers. When this information is found, we recommend either securely removing the files or emails using the Identity Finder Shred function or by encrypting the data using using TrueCrypt and the VT eToken (see below)

Please see the VT Identity Finder page for more information on using Identity Finder to scan your computers.

Installing Identity Finder

To install a stand-alone version of Identity Finder, please see the instructions at the VT Identity Finder page.

The Bradley Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering recommends installing the ECE Identity Finder. By registering with our Server, your Identity Finder install will be centrally managed by the ECE IT team and will receive automatic updates of the client software and policies.

Please review the ECE Policy regarding Personally Identifying Information and University-Owned Computers.

Install Identity Finder with the ECE Server (Windows)

1. Download ECE Identity Finder from http://filebox.ece.vt.edu/~identityfinder/ECE_IdentityFinder5.6.msi
2. Open your download folder, double click on ECE_IdentityFinder5.6.msi and follow the instructions below.
   • Windows Install Instructions

Install Identity Finder with the ECE Server (Macintosh)

1. Download Identity Finder from http://filebox.ece.vt.edu/~identityfinder/IdentityFinder5.6.0.1.zip
2. Open the download folder, extract IdentityFinder5.6.0.1.zip, double click IdentityFinder.pkg and follow the install instructions.
3. You may now start Identity Finder and run a scan.

Scanning your computer

After installing Identity Finder on your computer(s), please immediately scan your entire system. We recommend changing the scan location from My Documents to My Computer.

Basic instructions can be found here: http://security.vt.edu/idf/windows_use.html

While we understand that you might wish to sort through the files, time is of the essence. Malicious virus attacks can and will happen at any point. It is imperative that any files or emails containing Social Security Numbers be deleted immediately using the Shred feature. If you cannot Shred the files or emails immediately, please use the Secure feature to encrypt the data while you sort them for deletion or redaction.

If you wish to retain files or emails for record keeping (such as old grade logs) you must remove the SSN from the file. The Scrub feature can be used to remove just SSN from files, however it only works with Microsoft Office files.

While there should be no reason to retain any files with SSN, if you save a file or email for long term storage, these files must be encrypted. We recommend TrueCrypt for this purpose. Please see our article on using the VT eToken and TrueCrypt.

Please contact John Harris or Branden McKagen for questions or concerns.