A free tool that scans SharePoint file repositories for sensitive and compliance-regulated information such as credit card numbers has been launched by CipherPoint.

CipherPointCS content scanner allows SharePoint administrators and IT security administrators to easily scan SharePoint file repositories and find sensitive and compliance regulated information.

It also will facilitate sharing of regular expressions for finding other sensitive and regulated information patterns developed by the SharePoint community through thewww.sharepointdefenseindepth.com SharePoint community site.

"CipherPoint's customers in the Federal Government and regulated verticals such as the healthcare industry have asked us to extend our platform's capabilities to address Infopath forms, and list encryption, and to broaden the deployment scenarios to include claims-based authentication scenarios," said Mike Fleck, CipherPoint CEO.

"In addition, we've decided to make our content scanning technology freely available to allow any SharePoint or IT security administrator to quickly and easily identify content in SharePoint where increased levels of protection are required. It’s important that organizations make an informed decision about their compliance and security risks relative to SharePoint and we believe making this utility available at no cost to the entire SharePoint community is an important contribution that CipherPoint can make to reducing SharePoint security and compliance risk."

The CipherPointCS utility is available at no-charge to any organisation, and may be downloaded here (minimal registration required): http://www.sharepointdefenseindepth.com

CipherPoint offers products for encryption and key management for SharePoint document libraries