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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I didn’t write it out, besides it being boring, is we stole it from someone else who might rather share it themselves.

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Ironically work I dabble in the security automation space and I'd say this is the real "social ill" of all regulatory cultures. It is not the automation that's important is sharing and reusing agreed upon understanding of requirements and best practices (what and why we automate and the real goals not just cargo culting or copying). Most unintentionally hoard and others (auditors, special consultants) intentionally do with the belief this is their market differentiator. This is good but still falls short by not sharing and dropping hints. This is the default I see most of the time.

Most higher level attempts to meaningfully share and reduce toil and wasted effort are not incentivized in risk/governance/oversight culture, so we all get to lose.

I'd really like to have something to point to, when the issue of forcing-background-checks thing comes up again for our SOC2 certification.

In one case, I know a company is using reference checks to comply with the "background check" requirement.

Another issue I have here is that I want to be a little bit cagey about what our specific controls are, not because they're sensitive to us, but because there's a limit to how much we're supposed to talk publicly about the specific results of the audit (it's a Type I, people who know SOC2 know that means there are no unhappy surprises in it) --- the audit results are confidential, as a term of our engagement with the auditor.

(This is why there's a SOC3.)

Long story short: it's not complicated, and if you're currently doing a SOC2, like right now (or in the future) and you have reached the point where you're trying to get out of background checking everyone, shoot me a line and I'll tell you what we did and what we said (I may performatively NDA you in the process, because I like our auditors and don't want to irritate them).