The Spirion logo, in black and blue, leads to a separate window with the same logo when clicked on.

Spirion (formerly known as Identity Finder) is a tool to help prevent identity theft. It can search for and identify Personally Identifiable Information (PII) stored on your computer, file shares, or external media. Once identified, IS&T can help you move the information to be stored in a more secure location, or Spirion can assist with removing the data altogether. This type of information includes credit card numbers, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, birth dates, passwords, driver’s license numbers, addresses, passports, employee identification numbers, maiden names, or other custom data types.

This product is currently in a limited deployment within departments who work with sensitive regulated data, and is centrally managed by IS&T.

Key Features

  • Finds all occurrences of Social Security Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, Bank Account Numbers, and Passwords
  • Capable of finding user customizable identity types
  • Displays results in preview window for immediately analysis
  • Ability to perform custom location scanning (e.g. network file shares, SharePoint, OneDrive)

FAQs

What is Spirion?

Spirion is an application that runs on both Windows and macOS platforms that can scan for Personally Identifiable Information (PII).  PII examples include Social Security numbers, Credit Card numbers, brith dates, etc.

Why are we doing this?

IS&T is leading the charge to ensure any personally identifiable information is properly stored in secure environments.  Spirion enables BU to remediate our risk of exposing sensitive information.

Who is qualified to use Spirion?

At this point, we are limiting deployment of Spirion within departments who deal with sensitive regulated data managed by IS&T.

Will Spirion affect performance on my machine?

Depending on your machine specifications, the initial scan may take some time to complete.  During that initial scan, your computer will use  5%-10% of it’s resources to complete the scan.  Most clients will not notice a difference in performance.  Once the initial scan is complete, subsequent scans will take far less time to complete and will have no impact on your machine.

How long does a typical scan take?

This really depends on the amount of data on your machine, the size of your hard drive, and your computer’s specifications.  A typical scan may take up to 1-3 hours to complete.

What do I do if I believe Spirion is causing issues on my machine?

Contact us.  Submit a ticket to ithelp@bu.edu or call us at 353-HELP(4357) and we will be glad to assist.

What locations can Spirion scan?

Spirion is a powerful tool that can search many locations for PII data.  Locations include local drive, shared network drive, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and more.

Getting Started

Contact us for more information.