Can’t Hack This: Identity Finder

Could hackers break into your company’s files and steal personal information about employees and customers? In his former job as a pseudohacker for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Todd Feinman saw how easy it could be to penetrate an organization’s technological infrastructure.

He wasn’t the only one. Cyber attacks are a significant threat. More than $100 billion in   identity theft was reported by consumers and businesses over the past two years, according to the 2009 Identity Fraud Survey Report by Javelin Research. And while the use of anti-virus programs is widespread, they don’t necessarily protect against sophisticated hacking methods.

“Business and university files are rife with personal information like Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, bank account numbers, and more for both customers and employees,” Feinman says. If this information is not secure and is used for identity fraud, the business or school could be held liable.

So Feinman, along with his business partner David Goldman, created NYCbased Identity Finder, LLC. The company’s software program uses proprietary technology to search files, emails, browsers, and other system areas for vital personal information. Once Identity Finder locates the information, the user has the option of deleting it from the web, or allowing Identity Finder to encrypt it.

Use of the product has spread via wordof- mouth like, well, a virus. The first generation of Identity Finder was launched in 2007. The company has a 2010 projected revenue of $5 million.

Infiltrating the Market

Feinman spotted the business opportunity early on. “At PricewaterhouseCoopers, we were doing ‘attack and penetration’, or ethical hacking, to show companies how easy it is to break into their systems. We continued to see more and more of a need for software like Identity Finder, that combined both security and privacy protections,” he says.

Feinman notes that data-loss prevention software monitors an organization’s network perimeter. But should a hacker breach that perimeter—something cyberthieves are becoming increasingly adept at—he is likely to find personal information stored “in plain sight” on desktops, in databases and so on. Using proprietary technology, Identity Finder makes sensitive information inaccessible to a potential thief.

After launching the first generation of Identity Finder in February 2007, Feinman and his team came up with a strategic plan that differed from those of competitors in two ways.

First, he geared his first sales efforts toward universities because they automatically record new students’ Social Security numbers, and historically have kept them on file long after a student graduates.

Second, he decided the company wouldn’t give away free versions. “A common approach in this industry is to ‘buy’ customers, but we decided not to do that. Instead, we offered incentives to customers that allowed us to get the revenue, but also made it worthwhile for them to work with us,” Feinman says. “We approached Carnegie Mellon and said, ‘We’re going to give you special attention for the next 12 months, if you’re willing to become a customer. Pretty much every feature you want, we will build into this product, but we want you to pay full price.”

The school agreed. Feinman was able to claim the cachet of having Carnegie

Mellon for a customer, but even more important, he saw the deal as an opportunity to further enhance the product— which in return would allow him tocharge future customers more.

“We spent nine months building new features, such as Mac compatibility, for