Stopping Identity Theft in Its Tracks

by Dawn Handschuh, Personal Finance Writer   

Identity Finder/Free Edition
In a Nutshell

Ease of use: Superb

Range of Features: Just enough to show you what it can do and tease you into upgrading

Performance: Worked like a charm

What I most liked: The software's proprietary pattern-matching technology allows it to search for your sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, without requiring you to enter that information.

The bottom line: Identity Finder fills a void in identity theft prevention products, and if the Home and Professional versions work anything like the free version, it's money well spent.

If you're trying to protect your home from burglars but forgot to install a lock on the front door, you're overlooking the obvious. The same might be said about preventing online identity theft.

Your home computer is a treasure trove for would-be identity thieves. It's probably chock full of all sorts of personal identifying information, like your Social Security number, passwords, driver's license, credit card numbers, bank PIN numbers and more. Much of this information is hidden away in files — like auto-complete fields, cookies and instant messenger logs — not typically accessed by non-technical computer users.

Anti-virus and anti-spyware software are a basic necessity for every computer user, but if determined hackers, a burglar or anyone else who can physically access your computer can get past your first-line defense, your personal information is theirs for the taking.

That's where Identity Finder comes in. Launched in 2007 by Velosecure, the program searches computers for personally identifiable information and helps users delete or encrypt the data it uncovers to protect them from identity theft.

Anti-virus and anti-spyware programs do a good job of identifying external threats, but they don't protect personal data at risk on people's own computers, especially as more home users do business online, according to a Velosecure press release. 

"Very few home and business users realize how much of this information is inadvertently saved on their computers, most of it from web browsing or inside emails and files they believe they deleted. But when their laptop is lost or their workstation hacked, they start to worry about the consequences," Velosecure noted. Being continuously connected to the Internet increases exposure to security incidents, they added. Simply not knowing that personal identifying information even exists on your computer leaves you exposed.

Velosecure offers three editions of its Identity Finder product, including a rudimentary free version that gives users a taste of what it can do, as well as a Home edition ($24.95) and Professional edition ($34.95), designed for small businesses.

I gave the free version a whirl to see how it worked.

Downloading the program is a breeze, provided you use Windows Vista, Windows XP or Windows 2000 Professional and have at least 50 megabytes of hard-drive space.

Not being familiar with Velosecure or what, exactly, I was installing on my computer, I actually read the License Agreement and was impressed by the thoroughness of Velosecure's crack legal team, which, among other things, warned that the product "is not designed or intended for use in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, including the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communications systems, air traffic control, weapons systems, direct life-support machines," and more. A sign of our litigious society, I presume.

The program downloaded in about nine minutes. A set-up wizard guided me through the final steps.

Once the program is installed and you start your search, a status window shows you the program's progress as it scours your files, compressed files and hidden web data at lightning speed. (You'll have to purchase the Home edition if you want to search emails and attachments and the Windows registry.)

In the free version, Identity Finder searches only for credit card numbers and passwords; if you upgrade to the Home or Professional editions, it will also search for dates of birth, addresses, Social Security numbers (SSNs), bank account numbers and phone numbers. (You can also choose to add other unique identifying information that you consider private for searches.)

Most intriguing to me, you don't have to enter any of this information in order for Identity Finder to locate it somewhere on your computer. The program uses pattern-matching search algorithms (its proprietary AnyFind technology) to search for phone numbers in multiple formats to determine if the number is a true match. It searches for SSNs in the same way, by looking for patterns of numbers and using a mathematical formula to determine if the SSN is a true match. The program looks for data saved by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Outlook Express, Outlook and Windows Mail, plus all Microsoft Office documents and PDFs.

My search results indicated that 775 files were scanned, yielding just a single "match," a password I've used for a real estate website I often visited when I was house-hunting. Identity Finder did not tell me in what folder the website resided, but the Wizard prompted me to take either one of two cleanup actions: securely "shred" the password (using a file deletion standard followed by the U.S. Department of Defense) or encrypt it in a "password vault" so that no one could access it without, you guessed it, a password — one not saved on my computer.

(Interestingly, I do maintain a Word document that lists my many IDs and passwords for different websites I frequent. Some are preceded by the code "ID" and "PW," but I don't use my actual name for any of my IDs or passwords, so maybe that's why they weren't detected by Identity Finder.)

The Identity Finder navigation toolbar presents simple and easy-to-understand options for dealing with discovered personal identifiers. You can secure and shred data on Microsoft Internet Explorer (including temporary Internet files, cookies, history, form data and passwords). You can do this yourself, without the software, by going into Control Panel > Internet Settings, but how many times have you cleared your cache, deleted the history and discovered later that the data still exist (possibly due to redundant caches in systems folders that are generally hidden from non-technical users)? You can also shred data saved by Firefox and configure settings for auto-complete forms (including user names and passwords) and apply a master password for Firefox.

Although I only tried the free version of Identity Finder, earlier reviewers have noted that the full scan using one of the purchased editions can take many hours, and sometimes crashes. It's possible that Velosecure has already corrected both problems, but if not, an overnight scan would make things easier.

Identity Finder meets a need unaddressed by anti-virus programs and addresses computer-user vulnerabilities where they start — on the home computer. If you go online for any reason, it's not a good idea to have sensitive information residing on your computer. If the Home and Professional editions work like the free version, they're a formidable security tool you should add to your identify theft prevention arsenal.