On Friday afternoon (3-6-2009) I had an hour long discussion by phone with Identity Finder CEO Todd Feinman.  For those not familiar with what Identity Finder is, this is software that (nominally) you run on a client and it give a report of data that appears to it as being sensitive in nature.  The smarts of the product comes in pattern matching SSN, credit card numbers, health record numbers based on an array of criteria this company keeps track of.  They also claim to do a good job keeping any false positives to a minimum e.g. there are strings of numbers that form legitimate SSNs and others that don’t.

A couple of things have changed since I last looked at this product.  Firstly, there is now a Mac client.  The MS Windows version looked interesting but the last time I looked at the product, the Mac offering was just a remote scan of a system;  not exactly ideal.  However, there is now a Mac version 1.2 out that has many of the capabilities Stanford would be looking for.  Specifically, it runs locally  and gives a report to the user of what it has found.  However, it is not entirely in parity with the MS Windows version.  For example, one of the nicest features of the Windows version is not yet available.  Specifically, the ability to search (and either encrypt or shred!) dodgy strings found inside individual messages in Outlook/PST, Thunderbird or Eudora local mailboxes.  The Mac version can do these functions but only on files, not email boxes.  Still, this tool could be very useful.  Todd claimed that the Mac version will have the ability to do these functions for email boxes also in the June ‘09 timeframe.

Cornell, University of Chicago, CMU and Yale were all schools that Todd mentioned were using Identity Finder on some scale and gave contacts for us to speak with.  Published pricing for higher ed is ~ $9.75/user on volume of 10,000 users.  The license is by user, so if one person has 5 physical and 10 virtual machines, it’s still only one license.  There is some capability for centrally management but I didn’t get very much detail on that yet.  Identity Finder is sending fully functional test licenses to me on Monday.

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  By Bruce Vincent, March 9, 2009 @ 10:22 am

  As Todd Feinman had said, I just received the activation codes for:

  - Identity Finder Enterprise Edition
  - Identity Finder Mac Edition
  - Identity Finder Monitoring Console

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