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Sure, yes. The way I understand SOC2 relies on the auditors to set the effective standard. So it really depends who audited you

by tptacek7 hours ago|

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SOC2 auditors are accountants. A SOC2 auditor verifies only that you're doing what you say what you're doing.

by kevin_nisbet6 hours ago|

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And the way they verify you are doing what you say you are doing is by asking you to provide evidence, which is usually pretty easy to demonstrate that a policy was followed once or twice, a lot harder for them to pick up consistency issues or exceptions.

by randerson3 hours ago|

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I've had SOC2 auditors choose a random commit from our GitHub history, then ask to see the associated Jira ticket, logs from the build and deployment, etc. Hard to reliably pass an audit if you don't know which changes they'll drill down into.

They also asked for proof of system-enforced processes (e.g. GitHub branch protection rules and the setting for enforcing peer review for each change) which were basically proof of consistency.

by akerl_31 minutes ago|

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An example of what the parent commenter meant is more like:

1. You write a DRL that says “we do a disaster recovery test annually to ensure that we can restore a production backup”.

2. It takes you 20 tries in 2026 to do a successful restore because your find out the first 19 times that your backup is broken and incomplete.

3. You never have to mention the first 19 tries to the auditors when you prove you did do a successful DR restore.

by tptacek2 hours ago|

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They do that because in the DRL process you specified a change management process involving Github and Jira. If you specified a different process (for instance, Post-It notes applied to the bathroom wall), they would randomly ask for evidence about those Post-It notes.

That's what we're talking about when we say virtually any tool you can come up with will satisfy "vulnerability scans". For Cloudflare, it was nmap. I think they're right about this.

by dgellow7 hours ago|

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Obviously, yes

by akerl_7 hours ago|

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A SOC auditor who tells you that you can’t use an nmap scan to meet SOC2 obligations is a bad SOC auditor, because they’re attempting to enforce a constraint on you that SOC2 does not.

But the far more likely thing is that a medium SOC auditor, upon being told “we do our vulnerability scanning with nmap”, would say “I haven’t heard of nmap. You should use Tenable,” and if you’re letting SOC auditor drive your engineering you’d make a mistake and accidentally think that meant you needed to change your answer for SOC2 and go buy Tenable licenses.

by dgellow7 hours ago|

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The whole thread drifted way too far from a very mild push back I had regarding the claim « any automated process that can plausibly be described as instrumental in finding some kind of vulnerability is a "vulnerability scan" ».

My experience is that no, SOC2 auditors won’t consider literally any automated process of that sort as compliant. Which in no way implies the auditors are forcing you to use a licensed tool or driving your engineering.

I will stop that thread here, I don’t think that exchange is productive

by _hyn32 hours ago|

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If SOC2 relies on competent auditors (and you're right, it does), than it is an ineffective standard (and it mostly is).