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We indexed the Delve audit leak: 533 reports, 455 companies, 99.8% identical
- fadijob 7mo agoWe analyzed the leaked Delve audit reports and found some wild patterns: - The same auditor license number (PAC-FIRM-LIC-47383) appears in 487 out of 494 reports - Every Type II report has identical page numbers: Section 4 at page 30, tests at page 59, Section 5 at page 82 - 220+ "No exceptions noted" per report, across every single client - The system descriptions were copy-pasted from each company's marketing website We built tools to check this data: - Search by company name to see if they're in the leaked database - Paste any SOC 2 report text to scan for 10 template fingerprints - A swipe game where you try to tell real audit excerpts from the fakes (harder than you'd think) 455 companies indexed, all free, no signup needed. I'm also curious what the HN community thinks about the fingerprint detection approach, are there patterns we're missing?
- nemomarx 7mo agoThe swipe game idea is new to me - you have internal testers or some team use that to go through it?
- dpe82 7mo agoGenuinely curious: if you just need an independent audit report to check a box, do you really care how good a job the auditor did?
- chromacity 7mo ago"You" probably don't, but it's not just "you". There's also the counterparty who's asking to see that report. Maybe they're doing it for paper-pushing purposes of their own, but ultimately, somewhere up the chain, there's someone thinking "I can't personally audit all my suppliers, and I can't be sure they're doing the right thing, so I'm going to ask them to get an independent audit". Of course, this shows that the entire system is a bit of a charade, but the point is that someone cares and they're gonna be annoyed when they find out that the audit appears to be a sham. Whether they have a good alternative is a separate question. But here's another way to look at it: if we show blatant disregard for self-regulation, the government is eventually going to show up and come up with more onerous rules.
- throw310822 7mo ago> but the point is that someone cares Is it true, though? Or has everyone just been psyched into asking for that certification out of a vague fear of "consequences" or of being left behind?
- chromacity 7mo agoIt's not either-or. Companies care about security because of the consequences. If you're a big company contracting a small one, you don't want to get owned through that vendor because you know you'll be the one holding the bag (data loss, reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny, lawsuits). Small vendors will tell you what you want to hear because they're desperate for your business. Independent auditing is, in theory, a way to get closer to the ground truth. Well, in theory.
- mikeocool 7mo agoProbably not, in fact your auditors not being terribly thorough might be a selling point. But your clients, who are the ones asking for the box to be checked, might. In my experience, clients don't dig deeply into the report or the auditor, they just want to see that you 1) have the report 2) it doesn’t have any egregious exceptions. Perhaps if this makes big enough news, that’ll change.
- dminik 7mo agoAs the company? No. In fact, it's likely better for you if they do a bad job. You potentially get shielded from blame, but don't actually have to put in the work. As a user/customer/potential victim? Yeah, you do.
- mikeocool 7mo agoThe no exceptions noted piece is kinda funny. Most SOC2 auditors at least put in the minimal effort of finding one person who didn’t do their cybersecurity training, so the report’s not total boiler plate.
- jiveturkey 7mo agoI'd find this more compelling if you looked at a few thousand Vanta or Drata reports grouped by auditor. You're going to find the same commonalities with only trivial language differences. SOC2 reports are private between you and the auditor (that way if you "fail" you can just find another auditor or have a re-do, and no one is the wiser), and basically always gated behind a sales touchpoint (another hint about what utility they provide). I guess the Delve ones leaked which is why they can all be compared. 220 out of 494 "no exceptions" seems quite high to me. Nobody I've ever dealt with allows an exception to make its way into the report.
- SkyPuncher 6mo agoMost of this isn't that damning. SOC IIs are already highly templatized, so pages matching up really isn't meaningful. In fact, an overly detailed or overly verbose template is more likely to have matching pages since you'd never have to add additional content to it. System descriptions don't necessarily hold much weight. They're often more about giving a general shape of the system to help orient the reader, rather than providing a technically complete picture. Most of the meat in these is about the controls being tested (which are semi-standardized within an auditor) and the results. Many of these controls are really basic and easy to get "no exceptions noted". That being said, nearly everyone has at least one exception, even if it's minor. The fact that they didn't find any across all of their clients is a strong indicator they're not diving deeply enough.
- mikert89 7mo agoJust know that alot of startups with all star founders are closer to delve than not. Its mostly marketing, "look at this MIT genius that noticed something about legacy xyz industry that no one else did" Truth is venture funds are allocating a limited pie of what is really societies capital to people that dont deserve it
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoIt's almost a cycle. Something bad happens because of lack of regulation -> People strive for regulation -> Govt's actually regulates and sets some norms/procedures -> system works for a while -> Then someone takes the same idea and molds it into something else to bypass the regulation -> they get promoted because they are "clever" and get rewarded -> Then something bad happens as the tool is used by public. From Prediction markets to Buy now, pay later to Delve to so many other things. Is there a name to this particular phenomenon, because this just keeps on repeating in multiple industries.
- jgalt212 7mo ago> Truth is venture funds are allocating a limited pie This pie does not seem that limited recently.
- mikert89 7mo agothere are only a certain amount of series A rounds per year
- Barbing 7mo agoThanks for compiling this. Will get used to every sufficiently-interesting data dump being beautifully analyzed shortly after release.
- tptacek 7mo agoThe damage this will do to the reputation of the SOC2 Security Attestation is incalculable.
- coryrc 7mo agoAs someone unfamiliar with the topic, should I read this comment as very dry humour?
- icedchai 7mo agoBased on my personal experience with security theater and its many talented actors, yes.
- kirubakaran 7mo agoIncalculable due to division by zero error
- jiveturkey 7mo agoi don't think you can really descend below zero?
- colechristensen 7mo agoDoes SOC2 in general have a particularly high reputation? The only security compliance frameworks that have any particular reputation with me are the ones associated with the department of defense where the consequences range between a slap on the wrist warning or a small 5 figure fine to execution for espionage (which only ever happened for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though one could imagine there may have been more, uh, unofficial consequences that nobody ever heard about). In other words, people actually care about the enforcement of security standards in meaningful ways and there are meaningful consequences. Everything else... well they're all at least a little better than a participation trophy and the process proving you're trying isn't meaningless. It's just not been my experience with these things that they're particularly good guarantees that the spirit embodying the compliance program is actually being done particularly well.
- 7mo ago
- nirushiv 7mo agoThis has to result in jail time for multiple people… right?
- claudiug 7mo agoYC company, on forbes, so I guess maybe a bonus, promotions and AI spinoff...
- ppqqrr 7mo agowhat do you expect? if you’re “automating” an audit, it already means you don’t care. the LLM is there to blur the calculus of responsibility, take the blame if someone cares enough to look. happy customers, until someone “delves” a little too deep (like you did) and ruins the slumber party.
- viccis 7mo agoThis was my general reaction when it was determined that the "log review" portion of the PCI checklist (can't remember what level) could be satisfied by computer "review", and that newer PCI versions were moving towards preferring automated "review"
- adriand 7mo agoIs SOC 2 legit? I have this on my roadmap but now I’m wondering if it’s just security theatre?
- lokar 7mo agoAll of the audit / certifications are theatre. the only question is if your customer is required to participate in the show. If you really care about security, you need to separate it from this stuff, it can only hurt you. Do your own, real, security, and treat this compliance stuff as an opaque customer feature request.
- tptacek 7mo agoThat's a difficult question to answer. It shouldn't be, but it is. The reality is, SOC2 is a sales-enablement tool. You should: * Run a SOC2/compliance program that is entirely disjoint from your security practice. * Defer SOC2 until the work required to sell into customers demanding it (phone calls, questionnaires) exceeds the cost of obtaining SOC2. * Prepare for SOC2 by making simple best-practices engineering decisions, in particular single-signon for virtually everything and protected branches for all your repositories. * Do not allow SOC2 to force any engineering decisions that you would not have intuitively made yourself (this is a big risk with the evidence-gathering platforms like Drata, Delve, and Vanta). * Assume your SOC2 Type I report will suffice as a first attestation (ie: buy you 1 year of time) with all your customers, and understand that you cannot fail to obtain a Type I; your Type I is guaranteed. Over 5-6 years of discussing SOC2 with other security practitioners pretty intensively, the overwhelming weight of the evidence is that ~practically nobody actually reads SOC2 reports; they just check the box for each vendor and move on. Plan accordingly.
- truetraveller 7mo agoSince you know a lot about SOC: is SOC2 Type I (point in time) enough to close enterprise sales? Is it worth getting for a new startup (seems super simple)?
- tptacek 7mo ago
- jdns 7mo ago> "We may receive compensation from vendors listed below. All recommendations are based on independent research." this + new HN account? couldn't be more obviously a competitor. not to defend delve, but can’t be pushing this like some noble effort with the goal of transparency also lol @ the fake realtime "just searched for" toasts on a setInterval in the bottom left.
- thrdbndndn 7mo agoThe CSS doesn't even load here: https://trustcompliance.xyz/_next/static/chunks/17psh0.nytnht.css https://trustcompliance.xyz/_next/static/chunks/17psh0.nytnh...: 404 Not Found
- sgbeal 7mo ago> lol @ the fake realtime "just searched for" toasts on a setInterval in the bottom left. There is intermittent XHR traffic, but it's most definitely not returning any such information and it's posting what looks (in FF's dev tools) like garbage binary data.
- zwaps 7mo agoThis site also has no identifiable contact information whatsoever, making it likely illegal in many places
- fadijob 7mo agohello, this isn’t a competitor. I run a consulting company in the cybersecurity space and saw a chance to make this whole process more transparent. I agree it came off a bit clickbaity, I'm sorry, Claude probably pushed it too far. but I don’t have an audience anywhere, no following on social, so I needed to ship something fast and make it engaging. the intent wasn’t just this Delve thing, the goal is to move away from it and turn it into a proper hub for compliance transparency over time. But i need a way to marketing this intially. it’s been less than 24h, I built and pushed everything pretty quickly, so yeah there are rough edges. I’m already working through them and fixing things. on the account being new, I get how that looks. I mostly use X and reddit, this is actually my first time posting on HN so I had to create an account.
- charcircuit 7mo ago>The Biggest Compliance Fraud in SOC 2 History How is it bigger than the auditors that Delve was using. Surely Delve wasn't there only client. Delve is just a drop in the bucket.
- preinheimer 7mo agoLooking at our SOC 2 report (we don't use Delve, our auditor isn't on their list) I don't think this is quite the smoking gun it might look like if you're not reading SOC 2 reports for a living. There's a fair amount of boiler plate language in these reports, and a bunch of re-stating the SOC 2 controls. I'd expect two reports (same auditors, same platforms) to be nearly identical. If they're both using AWS, Github, Stripe, Vetty, they're subbing a lot of the exact same thing out to the same companies, referencing the same set of internal controls. Reading ours. There's a section titled $Company's Controls, followed by 20 pages listing the various SOC 2 controls. e.g. --- CC9.0 Common Criteria Related to Risk Mitigation CC9.1 The entity identifies, selects, and develops risk mitigation activities for risks arising from potential business disruptions. IR-01 A Security Incident Response Plan that outlines the process of identifying, prioritizing, communicating, assigning, and tracking confirmed incidents through to resolution is accessible to all relevant employees and contractors and is reviewed annually. --- Then there's another 20 pages of those same controls being listed, some language about how they tested the controls, and hopefully "No Exceptions Noted". That's not going to change much between companies.
- ecshafer 7mo agoThis mirrors my thoughts. A page of boiler play text with some check boxes, with some checked vs unchecked is going to be 99.8% similar between companies as well. A lot of audits are very much forms with boiler plate and fill in the blank. There is no point rewriting everything from scratch.
- jiveturkey 7mo agoboilerplate is one word. sorry for the nit, feel free to backpfeifengesicht
- ecshafer 7mo agoI don't think that is an important point.
- 7mo ago
- bearjaws 7mo agoSOC2 has been in trouble for a while now. Completely gamified. I was managing an acquisition of a healthtech company and asked if they did an internal risk assessment as part of their audit. Nope. SOC2 certified, has never actually put to paper "here's what we know we're doing wrong, here is how we plan to remediate it."
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoWhat is SOC2 ? I studied hardware electronics engineering
- Bengalilol 7mo ago[dead]
- mesmertech 7mo ago" let r = ["Acme Corp", "CloudVault", "DataSync Pro", "NexGen AI", "SecureStack", "TrustLayer", "Vanta", "ComplianceIQ", "InfraSec", "ByteShield", "PipelineOps", "CyberNova", "TokenGuard", "ZeroTrust Labs", "Aether Security", "PrismData", "CloudArmor", "RiskLens", "AuditTrail", "ShieldIO"] , n = ["just checked", "searched for", "ran a scan on", "verified"] , a = ["San Francisco, CA", "New York, NY", "Austin, TX", "London, UK", "Berlin, DE", "Toronto, CA", "Seattle, WA", "Chicago, IL", "Denver, CO", "Boston, MA", "Singapore", "Sydney, AU"]; " fake popups, xyz domain, recent zeitgeist, 100% straight vibecoded. good hustle I have to say. a domain that'll now get ranked on google for SOC 2 compliance which likely has a high CPC and good DR to piggyback off.
- fadijob 7mo agofair call on the popups, they’re not real-time. I added them quickly to make the page feel less empty while testing engagement, probably not the best call in hindsight and I’ll remove or replace them with something real. on the "vibecoded" part, yeah I moved fast. this was built in under a day to get something out and see if people even care about this angle. that doesn’t mean the underlying data or direction is fake though. the domain choice is just speed and availability, not some SEO master plan. if this turns into something real I’ll move it to a proper brand/domain. and yeah I get why it looks like a growth/SEO play, but the actual goal is to push more transparency around these audits. if I just wanted traffic there are easier angles than going after something this niche and messy. either way, appreciate you calling it out, some of it is fair and already being fixed.
- poisonborz 7mo agoCybersecurity compliance, but .xyz site built under a day to get something out fast to drum up engagement and "test the vibes on the idea". Makes one wonder what became of this industry.
- hobofan 7mo agoDelve's response blog post from two days ago: https://delve.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims https://delve.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims
- mkl95 7mo agoI've worked with SOC2-certified companies where employees would email each other plaintext credentials, publish them in Notion pages, etc. You cannot cure stupidity by "complying".
- tptacek 7mo agoThere's no particular reason anyone's SOC2 DRL would cover "make sure people don't email credentials". It's not a technical certification.
- bunbun69 7mo agoI don’t mind AI. I mind slop. This website is slop. There is so much wrong
- logaudit 6mo ago[dead]