How Cornell Plans To Purge Campus Computers of Personal Data

and so forth writes "Cornell lost a laptop last year with SSNs. Now, they've mandated scanning every computer at the University for the following items: social security numbers; credit card numbers; driver's license numbers; bank account numbers; and protected health information, as defined by HIPAA. The main tools are Identityfinder (commercial software for Windows and Mac), spider (Cornell software for Windows from 2008) and Find_SSN (python script from Virginia Tech). The effort raises both technical questions (false positives, anyone?) and practical issues (should I trust closed source software to do this?). Have other Universities succeeded at removing confidential data? Success, here, should probably be gauged in terms of diminished legal liability after the attempted clean up has been completed." Note: this program affects the computers of university employees and offices, rather than students' personal machines.

Comments

We'll get right on that.

[blair1q]

We'll get on that, just as soon as our Y2K-bug vulnerability scan is done running.

Cautionary Tale: Rat Penis Data

[seebs]

http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1994/1994AXP.html

Excerpt:

And the war continued, with progressively more redundant copies using
progressively more of the disk farm, and the encryption methods evolving
under the selection pressure of the system administrators' decryption
efforts.

Re:DBAN

[Anonymous Coward]

That being said DBAN is the right tool for the job all the time. I need to remove a folder.. I'll just dban the whole disk. The folder is now gone... Problem solved.