Spider is a tool developed by Cornell University. From the documentation: “Spider scans your hard drive, web site, or other collection of files to identify confidential data such as social security, credit card, or bank account and routing numbers. When the scan is complete, Spider produces a log listing all files that may potentially contain confidential data.”

The following types of information can be detected by Spider:

• Social Security numbers (SSN)
• Canadian Social Security numbers (SIN)
• Credit card numbers
• UK National Health Insurance numbers (NINO)

Local files are scanned (zip archives are also inspected if not password protected). Note that Spider does NOT protect you. It just warns you about potential security breaches (false positives are always possible).

The tool configuration is easy and extra check can be added like regular expressions:

regex \d{9}
regex \d{3}-\d{3}-\d{3}

Once a problem has been identified, it’s up to you to implement the right solution to protect the data (get rid of them, move them to a safe place, encrypt them, etc). Spider is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Site: www2.cit.cornell.edu.