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Notes from the engineers who write the scanner.

Compliance, incident analysis, the regex behind high-fidelity detection, and the occasional opinionated post about how this category is built.

April 14, 2026

Scanning Shared Drives and NAS Devices for PII: A Guide for IT Teams

Learn how to scan network drives and NAS devices for PII, including practical advice on mapping network paths, handling permissions, dealing with millions of files, and scheduling scans outside business hours.

April 13, 2026

Air-Gapped PII Scanning: Why Your Most Sensitive Data Shouldn't Leave the Network

Cloud-based PII scanners require sending your data to someone else's servers. For defense, healthcare, finance, and legal organizations, that's a non-starter. Here's how local-only scanning works and why it matters.

April 13, 2026

Scanning Unstructured Data for PII: PDFs, Word Docs, and Spreadsheets

How to scan PDFs for PII, find PII in documents like Word and Excel files, and why unstructured data is the biggest blind spot in most compliance programs.

April 1, 2025

Samsung Germany Ticket Data Breach What PII Was Exposed and What To Do

Analysis of the Samsung Germany data breach exposing 270,000 customer tickets. Learn what PII was leaked and steps to protect yourself.

April 10, 2024

10 Best Practices for Implementing PII Scanning

Essential best practices for implementing PII scanning in your organization, from data inventory to encryption and employee training.

March 15, 2024

The Critical Importance of Encrypting and Securing Personally Identifiable Information

Learn why encrypting and securing PII is crucial for privacy, preventing identity theft, maintaining trust, and complying with GDPR and CCPA regulations.

March 1, 2024

What is sensitive data discovery?

Understanding PII data discovery - what it is, why it matters, and how organizations use it to find and protect sensitive personal information.

February 20, 2024

10 File-Based PII Scanning Tools

Compare the top 10 file-based PII scanning tools including ManageEngine, Spirion, Varonis, and PII Crawler to find the best fit for your organization.

February 5, 2024

Regular Expressions used in PII Scanning

Common regex patterns for detecting SSNs, emails, phone numbers, and credit cards in PII scanning, plus why NER methods often work better.

January 25, 2024

Enumerating Files for PII Scanning

Learn how to enumerate and discover files across your system for comprehensive PII scanning, including network shares and cloud storage.