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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.
After logging off, revert to the last backup. If there's no data on the computer, there's no personal data on the computer. Anything you need saved goes on removable storage.
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Does this include professors?
I know a lot of scientists who would be quite annoyed if the people from the IT department (who are clueless policy-obsessed wankers at my institution) came in and wanted to search through a bunch of simulation results and LaTeX files looking for SSN's.
a) too fucking bad.
b) Sign this waver that says you are legally responsible if your repository of data were to contain information such as SSN/Credit Card etc.
I don't get the premise of the article. Scanning for credit card data and SSN is quite easy and simple. It's no more intrusive than a virus scan. Being opened, or closed source doesn't make any bloody difference either.
Intrusion detection systems should also be running and scanning for data that conforms with SSN or creditcard formats.
http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1994/1994AXP.html
Excerpt:
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
In an age of always-connected, treating computers as "smart terminals" with no long-term local storage save an encrypted self-destructing-on-wrong-password cache can be very useful.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Ohio State relies on their institutional data policy and Disclosure or Exposure of Personal Information policy. Essentially, any protected information has to be kept on encrypted devices. That worked fairly well, except once they had all their computers encrypted they quit paying the license fees to PGP. They didn't know the software, which they thought was only pre-boot authentication, phoned home and had a DRM time-bomb in it to automatically drop everything Windows was doing, and spend a couple hours decrypting the whole drive after a certain date if the subscription wasn't renewed. I'd be pretty weary of trusting that kind of task to proprietary software, especially if it requires a subscription like ours did. Posted AC for obvious reasons. If it's closed source, you never know what kind of trick the vendor might be able to pull on you.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/10/14/739551/unc-cancer-scientist-appeals-her.html.
Should you trust closed source software to do this scan?
Should you trust the bank managing your transactions?
Should you trust closed source software in medical equipment?
Should you trust SAP to manage your financial transactions?
Should you trust a Windows computer for anything more important than your gmail password?
Should you trust Google Chrome when logging into your netbanking?
You know what? I think on the grand scheme of things trusting a piece of closed source software specifically designed to search for information made by a company which would literally be sued into oblivion if they did what the article was hinting at, ranks pretty damn low on the list of things I worry about.
Then the correct policy is "Don't haphazardly store personal data on machines without considering what you are doing". There is no reason to barge into Dr. Smith's office, who's madly creating his slides for the conference next week while trying to babysit a supercomputer at Berkeley while fending off emails from his students, and insist in a very bureaucratic tone that you have to scan his workstation, the RAID, his other computer, his student's computer, and the two computers used to monitor various instruments (which the other students are taking data on) for SSN's.
Unfortunately, Dr Smith is taking his laptop to the conference. He's much too busy to go on travel without taking all of his data with him on the laptop, such as his students grading info (SSNs) or info on the other proprietary projects he's working on. He he's too important to worry about such trivialities such as data protection policies issued by those idiots on the Board of Directors. After all drive encryption slows things down too much he hears, but in truth he doesn't know how to set it up. Of course his laptop gets stolen and now the University has to report that data was compromised. Suddenly Dr Smith is no longer an asset to the university but rather a liability.
Sorry, but anyone who has worked in IT or even law enforcement knows damn well that users will ignore written policies unless there is some level of monitoring and enforcement. Just scroll up a bit and you'll see examples of those guys posting stuff like "just store the ssn as an integer so they scripts don't find it".