IDF Scanning Instructions
Identity Finder Windows Instructions and Mac Tutorial
Penn State Identity Finder Scanning Resources, tutorials, and information: http://techsupport.la.psu.edu/faq/security/identity-finder
Identity Finder tutorial for Mac: http://its.psu.edu/training/resources/IdentityFinderMac/IdentityFinderMac.htm
Identity Finder is designed for you to handle the remediation on your own, but if you run into any difficulties or have questions, the Carrara Education Technology Center (CETC) IT Staff will provide you with the application and help you facilitate regular scanning and remediation procedures if such support is required. The Identity Finder application will be pushed to your system through our network and can be found and run from the following location on your system.
On an Apple/Mac: go to Applications and select Identity Finder.
On a Windows/PC: go to Start > Programs and select Identity Finder.
You can run an Identity Finder scan at any time.
When you open Identity Finder it will ask you to create a profile password, please note that there is no way of re-setting the password if you forget it.
If you are experiencing a problem with your computer and would like assistance in resolving it, please fill out our Technical Assistance Form, or call 865-0626.
All of our work is governed by Policies, Procedures, Guidelines, and Laws for computing and networking at Penn State University.
Start a manual scan by clicking the “Start” icon in the upper left hand corner.
When the scan is complete you will see the following window:
We recommend you select the Wizard
Click “Next” Identity Finder will now show you each bit of sensitive info by type: usually browser data will be first:
Select the items in the list you would like to ‘delete’ and select “Shred selected” and click next; you will have a chance to ignore or skip the items you do not select.
Use Shift + Select for multiple deletions.
You will get a pop up asking if you are sure, click Yes! And then OK on the confirmation window:
You will be given the next batch of items by type, repeat the above steps to select to shred, ignore or skip the items. Note: Adobe Acrobat will generate some false positives that are samples and templates.
“Shred Selected” will delete the item. “Ignore” the item if it is a false positive. You can also “Skip” the item if you intend to go to the file and manually delete the sensitive information from it later (for example you might want to skip a 30 page document that has one social security number in it so that you can go in and delete that one SSN and not have to delete or password-protect the document.)
Once you have gone through all of the files and selected to Shred, Scrub, (Scrub may be grayed out, please see below for more information.), Ignore, or Skip each one, you may exit the program. It will give you the option to schedule a regular scan; if you handle sensitive information on a regular basis you may wish to do so.
Upon completing the initial baseline scan, you’ll want to perform a follow up scan at your convenience to confirm that your system is free of personally identifiable information.
Scrubbing Personal Information
When a location has sensitive identity match information in it and you wish to keep the item but remove the personal information only, you should utilize the Scrub feature. Scrub is great when you no longer need the personal information but want to keep the original item.
The Scrub button is located on the Main ribbon and is enabled for certain file types. You may only scrub Office 2007 file (e.g., docx, xlsx, pptx) and text files (i.e., *.txt, *.log, *.ini).
There are two ways to Scrub a location:
- Single click the result with the left mouse button to highlight it and click the Scrub button on the Main ribbon.
- Single click the result with the right mouse button to highlight it and bring up a context menu, then highlight and left-click on Scrub.
It will be necessary to periodically run the scan on your machine, but the good news here is that the initial scan takes the longest and that follow-up scans are quick and focus only on new files. Thank you in advance for your cooperation with this effort to remove PII from College of Education computers.
A more detailed tutorial can be found by going to: Penn State's Remediation, Training Video, and documentation - http://its.psu.edu/training/resources/IdentityFinder/IdentityFinderTraining.htm
