Using Spider Panel Discussion

When: November 30, 2006 2:00 to 4:00 EST

Where: G10 Biotech

Background:
There is a large effort growing nationally to identify and better protect personal information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers and other such data. Cornell has developed a tool called Spider (http://www.cit.cornell.edu/security/tools/) for the purpose of identifying files on our computers that contain social security or credit card numbers.

We are in the midst of what amounts to a very large cleanup effort — identify and remove all personal information from our computers that is no longer necessary. Unfortunately, the entire cleanup process is not a trivial effort. While Spider aids considerably in the identification of files that contain this type of information, the process of reviewing the identified files and then removing those files if no longer needed can be a time consuming activity. Other challenges include: how to deploy the tool unit wide, how to accommodate people who need assistance with the tool, etc.

This panel discussion plans to highlight some units and individuals who are making good progress in the use of Spider and the necessary cleanup effort. We will provide a quick overview of these activities and then open up to a broader discussion and questions concerning specific implementations and lessons learned.

A number of people will be joining us remotely and we will be broadcasting this live over the web. If you cannot attend in person you can still view the event using RealPlayer from this link: http://specevents.video.cornell.edu:80/ramgen/encoder/live.rm

Hope to see you there,
Steve Schuster
Director, IT Security Office
Cornell University
sjs74@cornell.edu