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GCN Home > 05/05/08 issue

Nowhere to hide

GCN Lab review: Identity Finder makes it easy to locate and manage documents with ID info

By Greg Crowe

The loss or theft of personal information is a serious problem. The proliferation of portable and mobile devices and their inevitable attrition only compound the risk.

Unless you are assiduously careful, you deposit some of your identity information on your computer practically every day. From cookies left by Web sites to log-in files for applications, various aspects of your identity are strewn across your computer.

When the computer connects to a network in a physically secure office, this is not a major concern. However, if that computer is a laptop PC or personal digital assistant that is swapped among several users — all the while running the risk of loss or theft — it becomes a potentially serious problem.

Identity Finder 3.4: Enterprise Edition from Identity Finder averts this potential disaster by searching your computer, alerting you to the presence of identity information and offering various options for dealing with it.

We found the Identity Finder software simple and quick to install.

A wizard led us by the hand through the steps of an introductory search for the most basic identity data — credit card information, bank accounts, Social Security numbers and passwords. We also could enter specific data to search for, such as date of birth, mother’s maiden name or a phone number. We then chose whether to search files, registry items or other information in addition to where to search. Once we had made our selections, it went to work.

Identity Finder was methodical in looking for the requested information. Searching the 26,870 items on our test computer took 19 minutes, 46 seconds. Considering that it must search each file completely for these patterns and information, we consider that quick.

We were also pleased to see that the Enterprise Edition can search network drives as easily as it can local ones. In our tests, this type of search was nearly as fast as the local search, slowed only by our network connections.

Master sleuth

Identity Finder carries its quest for the target data not only to text, word processor and spreadsheet files but also — through an Object Linking and Embedding database connection — to large, server-level databases, Web sites served by network computers, and even cookies and auto-complete fields that reside on every Web browser. There is no hiding from this master sleuth.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Content / Record Management, Data Management



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