Apple Private Cloud Compute SoC 3 audit reports
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Also Apple certainly does invest heavily in security and privacy but SOC2's are so commoditized that it's like saying "look I can afford 50k", it's not particularly interesting
SOC2 (Type 2) in theory requires an audit that you're actually doing what you said you'd do in (Type 1).
Both may also allow general lag time.
Note that firms decide on their own which controls to include, meaning, they get to decide to include or exclude various controls, the audit is on only the ones they picked. Pick basic controls, it's cheaper to pass easily, and now you have a logo.
This means SOC2s of either type cannot be compared to one another (and SOC2 Type 1 are roughly logo-ware).
SOC3 is, roughly, SOC2 redacted.
Recap:
SOC2 Type 1 is a firm picking some controls to say they'll do them, SOC2 Type 2 is roughly a firm having someone look at whether they're doing that (warning, screenshots might suffice, audit verification is probably not what you think), and SOC3 is public or non-confidential water down of that, typically without findings.
The only thing that matters is what controls, specifically, they're actually audited on. So ideally you want to know what the controls they picked are, and that a SOC2 Type 2 was audited on those.
Btw, keep in mind that "end to end encryption" means "https" and most controls have similarly basic ways of achieving them. It's difficult to fail SOC2 Type 2 core controls if you know "don't be useless" is how you pass them.
Also, it's not $50K even through the big five DIY SOC2 Type 2 shops. You can use the same ones trillion dollar firms use, by signing up online, and you'll be surprised how inexpensive relative to the cost of failing to let a business check that box in their procurement process.
For context, this is how easy it is to get a SOC2: https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a...
Deel is the ycombinator startup that allegedly spied on their competition while Delve is the ycombinator startup that allegedly fakes SOC2 compliance.
IME SOC2 is still quite involved for any company, especially smaller ones without specialized security personnel.
Again, Deel is HR, not SOC2. Delve was the SOC2 company described in the article linked above.
Deel is the ycombinator startup that allegedly spied on their competition while Delve is the ycombinator startup that allegedly fakes SOC2 compliance.
Delve used an audit mill they paid to rubber-stamp the cookie-cutter and AI slop reports it authored. I hope it ends up in fraud charges.
But I wouldn't assume that's the case for all SOC2 reports. Any decent auditing firm should be far more rigorous.
As a German I remember that they were banned from doing certain audits in Germany until earlier this year due to their involvement in the wirecard scandal. So at least my personal believe that their audits are done rigorously is nonexistent.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/03/business/wirecard-ey-ban-...
Even with an external audit - think of how many projects and repositories and servers and libraries and legacy systems Apple, a 50-year-old company with 166,000 employees, could have.
Then think about how much inspection is involved in a $50,000 audit. I doubt you get more than one inspector working full time for a year. In which case they've got 45 seconds of to audit each employee's entire work output. And places like EY will bill some people out at $700/hour, so it could be an order of magnitude less than that.
So this isn't some fine-toothed-comb forensic investigation or adversarial penetration test.
In practice, if you're careful about how you do your Type 1, the Type 2 is almost as trivial. Your HR/bizops practice is much more likely to screw up and cause exceptions than anything you do in IT or engineering.
I wrote an article about this, and I think it's the Correct advice for virtually every startup thinking about SOC2:
https://fly.io/blog/soc2-the-screenshots-will-continue-until...
A few years before that, I wrote an article about what we learned from the consulting practice we ran building SOC2-supporting security programs for startups:
https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/03/12/soc2-starting-seven...
I've had the experience, many times, of offering this advice in some forum and having someone try to rebut it, claiming that SOC2 is difficult, or that real customers will pick a SOC2 attestation apart with a fine-toothed comb looking for shortcuts you took, or that they built their whole security practice around SOC2. I can go all 12 rounds with someone on any of those points, but I think you can get most of my take from those two posts.
Either way, go read his links.
A security-only audit for a small company with a narrow product focus can indeed be very inexpensive. A full SOC 2 examination for a large organization with a mix of legacy and modern systems by a name-recognizable public accounting firm can be many hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more if you need a Big 4 firm.
In my opinion, there's not much value to the "cheap" audits... If you're doing enterprise sales to a certain kind of client, your partners who demand an audit are going to want a reputable auditor or they're just going to put you through their own in-depth procurement due diligence regardless. The segment of the industry where a SOC 2 attestation is mandatory to participate but where any random auditor will do feels pretty narrow.
My experience is the opposite of yours: having a security SOC2 ends the vendorsec process it any enterprise buyer, and enterprise buyers virtually never read anything in the SOC2 other than a glance at the exceptions. A very large, very security-intensive vendor we have all heard of told me a story about a vendor they had that gave them several years of repeated Type 1 reports. Went fine.
(I don't mean Apple; Apple spends more on security than almost any firm in the world.)
https://fly.io/blog/soc2-the-screenshots-will-continue-until...
Or point me to some public critiques within the industry?
https://www.iansresearch.com/resources/all-blogs/post/securi...
Oh no. Looks like you never went through SOC2.
1. No, it does not require 50k, an auditor can cost way less (10k? maybe even less).
2. But the process of preparing for the audit will take a lot of work securing your systems (and increasing reliability and privacy as well), as long as you take it seriously. Of course you can lie to the auditor, but it's up on you. And auditor -- they might lose their CPA license and go to prison. Their job is to catch your lies.
Source -- went through it, and took it seriously. It really did increase our security stance, even though we thought we were good at it.
Admittedly this is on the "real" audit side and not the advisory/consulting side, which would be the ones to handle SOC I imagine, but nonetheless a position I find a bit absurd.
[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/a9deb987-df70-4a72-bd41-47ed8942e...? [1]: https://www.ft.com/content/c25de9fb-a808-4946-ade6-80d76a66a...
I mean, it's not like the supposed "Chinese wall" at the Big 4 has ever been accused of being "illusory" on multiple occasions.
PS: regarding "most of them" -- if you're one-person shop, you'll likely fail a control that requires your board of directors to be independent of company management (i.e. having directors that do not work for the company). That's OK, but will be reported on your SOC2 report.
macOS Security Compliance Project
Audits are decidedly imperfect, but on balance people tend to toe the line better on good practices when they know they're being audited.
I have absolutely 0 reasons to believe Apple Private Cloud is not a data extraction mechanism for the gullible. Unless I can manually inspect the source, or at least run the binaries on my own hardware that I can firewall and inspect the network traffic, I'm absolutely confident Apple steals all the data to build better ad targeting models, or to sell to the highest bidder.