How Cornell Plans To Purge Campus Computers of Personal Data

Posted by timothy on Friday October 15, 2010 @11:27AM from the very-very-carefully dept.

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.

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DBAN by tverbeek · 2010-10-15 11:53 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Have they tried DBAN?

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http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Re:Hit submit a bit too fast... by dissy · 2010-10-16 07:11 · Score: 0, Offtopic

That is how Deep Freeze works at least. Not a partition, but a cache file on the disk, that is held encrypted.
I'm not exactly sure the method SteadyState uses, but as it is more intended to reduce infections and users changing stuff, so it might very well be open to raw disk scanning to get at previous data.