Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Scanner for sensitive information
From: Wayne Bullock <wayne () FAU EDU>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:03:39 -0400
Thank you very much to everyone who responded. --Wayne Wayne Bullock, MSCIS, CCNA Associate Director, Communication Services Infrastructure Information Resource Management Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Road Boca Raton, FL 33431 -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Isac Balder Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 11:41 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Scanner for sensitive information Wayne, First let me adress the specific question
My question is whether there is some product or other software that I can run centrally that can help me assist webmasters keep sensitive information inaccessible to the public. Ideally, I would like to do this on much the same way I use my vulnerability scanner now.
Yes and No. There are products both commercial and free. Centrally managed tools will mostly fall in the commercial arena. Your commercial tools will also get pricey real quick as they are often marketed under the buzzwords of DLP, data leakage prevention. Most of your free tools will be stand alone clients without automated upstream reporting. You effectively mention two seperate things here PII on the server harddrive and PII accessable to the public I seperate them mainly because you specifically mentioned web servers. To address the first. The two main free tools are Schedule a time to meet with and coordinate the work with your web team as you will need privelges or someone cooperative with privelges. Univeristy of Texas senf is nice - multi platform java based. https://source.its.utexas.edu/groups/its-iso/projects/senf/ Cornell Spider is also nice - windows .net based / seperate *nix client. http://www.cit.cornell.edu/security/tools/ and recently found University of Illinois's Firefly for Mac (have not played with this one yet) http://firefly.uiuc.edu Now to address the 2nd item, Information that is actually accessable to the public. It's a bit manual but I have to say goolge hacking, and not just on google, also hit other search engines. CDC's Goolag is nice to automate the Google searches, just make sure you change the default time settings so that you do not get blocked by google. http://www.goolag.org/ Happy Scanning I.B. "Say hello to all the apples on the ground" --- On Mon, 6/16/08, Wayne Bullock <wayne () FAU EDU> wrote:
From: Wayne Bullock <wayne () FAU EDU> Subject: [SECURITY] Scanner for sensitive information To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Date: Monday, June 16, 2008, 10:58 AM I'm being asked to scan our web servers (but perhaps others servers such as FTP, etc) for sensitive information. We are especially looking for Social Security numbers, Z-numbers, credit card numbers phone numbers, etc. Currently, we do an external vulnerability scan of the University's computers several times a year with emphasis on the DMZ computers. However, this will not search for sensitive information, at least with the product we are using. The software that I have been able to easily identify needs to run on the web server but, clearly, I don't have privileged access to all University web servers. I know that we can do more to educate our systems managers and make them responsible for running the spiders on their own systems periodically. We're working on that. My question is whether there is some product or other software that I can run centrally that can help me assist webmasters keep sensitive information inaccessible to the public. Ideally, I would like to do this on much the same way I use my vulnerability scanner now. If this exists, I'm sure the bad guys have it by now. I appreciate your thoughts. Thanks. --Wayne Wayne Bullock, MSCIS, CCNA Associate Director, Communication Services Infrastructure Information Resource Management Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Road Boca Raton, FL 33431
Current thread:
- Scanner for sensitive information Wayne Bullock (Jun 16)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Di Fabio, Andrea (Jun 16)
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Roger Safian (Jun 16)
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Randy Marchany (Jun 16)
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Isac Balder (Jun 16)
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Watson, Michael (Jun 16)
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Wayne Bullock (Jun 17)
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Doug Markiewicz (Jun 18)
- Re: Scanner for sensitive information Wyman Miles (Jun 18)