I don't understand why there shouldn't be a strict-liability play here on top of penalties for knowing violations.
You lose all your customer's data to a darknet leak? We should be taking a huge chunk out of your balance sheet.
My insurer has disclosed names, social security numbers, and ENTIRE MEDICAL CASEFILES for their entire client base more than once at this point in overlapping data breaches. Why exactly don't they owe me $10k for my trouble, or N% shares of the company? If that's too much, why do these penalties exist for knowing disclosure, if incompetence is so tolerated that knowing disclosure does no damage?
As is the case with SOC2, the "vulnerability scan" requirement here is likely to be meaningless; any automated process that can plausibly be described as instrumental in finding some kind of vulnerability is a "vulnerability scan", so all you have to do is run nmap.
Thanks for the clarification, in that case the text is indeed really weak. Does that system work in practice, or are companies just claiming they are HIPAA compliant with close to no actual auditing mechanism?
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.
I'm not being snarky when I say that not getting your automated vulnerability scan, whatever it might have been, past your SOC2 auditors is a skills issue. SOC2 audits are not technical and the vulnerability scan control in SOC2 is categorically not meaningful. Cloudflare wrote a whole post about this.
FWIW I agree that SOC2 for automated vulnerability scans has a really low bar and isn’t too meaningful. At no point did I defend SOC2 here. The bar I’ve seen is above “just an nmap”, which is pretty bad standard IMHO. You seem to be reading way too much in my comments
It really depends on who is testing and enforcing these standards. I have worked in this area, built scalable systems for medicare. The annual pen testing used to be a joke. Any consultant who would come had no clue what was being built, how the process worked - and they wouldn't even care to understand. After a meeting, we'd get the notification that the pen testing was successful. So, on paper you can change any rule - if the consultants you are hiring don't give a shit (which they usually don't)- nothing gets enforced. We would go out of our 'job responsibilities' to do internal testing of all sorts (the external agency would not even do 2% of that).
It's so grating to read obviously LLM-generated text, even more so from a company that is asking us to hire them for a security audit.
AI writing makes somewhat more sense on tech blogs. Where a business' value proposition is "I am knowledgeable and reliable about computer security", it seems unwise.
I was thinking the same - makes the article feel very amateur and unprofessional. And I know for a fact that AI can do a better job at writing than this, I doubt they read it and had any sense of how poor the writing actually is.
Interesting. I haven’t fully read through the rule change, but seems like HHS is directly adopting the controls required by HITRUST? I have been out of the industry for a while. Always interesting how the industry shapes regulation and vice versa.
PCI-DSS still takes the cake for most oppressive rules out of all the compliance frameworks. The notion that your system might become "in-scope" is one of the scariest things you have to deal with. Avoiding this designation is almost always easier than satisfying all the controls they prescribe. Stripe & friends have it really good. I don't know who their equivalents are in the health care industry but I am certain they exist.
I despise PCI-DSS. A friend owns a small business and has a credit card reader. Due to that, we had to build out a separate LAN so that the reader is on its own precious network, and have to pay an external auditor for a quarterly scan of our external IP. Bullshit past findings were things like “your VPN server supports old encryption algorithms”. “But our clients don’t support them. They select the newer algorithms!” “But they could!” “What do you care? Those clients aren’t even on the same LAN as the scanner.” “PCI-DSS lol!” I have no way of knowing, but I bet the firewall might’ve accidentally blocked the scanning IP from reaching the VPN server port on the retest and called it a day, but surely not.
Basically, Visa and friends externalized their own shitty security and made every other company in the land responsible for wrapping their janky hardware in electronic bubble wrap. A real security framework would’ve said “don’t make a credit card scanner so weak that it can’t survive being on the same LAN as a printer”. Instead, the whole country has to waste billions of dollars mitigating that risk for them.
> Bullshit past findings were things like “your VPN server supports old encryption algorithms”. “But our clients don’t support them. They select the newer algorithms!”
Given that downgrade attacks are a massive category of attacks for network protocols, and in fact modern protocols go to great lengths to make them impossible, that doesn’t sound very bullshit at all.
It's worth noting that cybersecurity requirements can be a mechanism of control.
As a government regime, do you want to build an effective surveillance system where health data on large numbers of suspects can be pulled into a data fusion system at the push of a button, once a judicial framework for rubber-stamping is in place? And do you want to be able to pressure vendors into not supporting certain types of research/analysis and even direct patient care that could be construed/presented as counter to the regime's goals?
Both of these are easier when smaller vendors are forced out and larger vendors are the only ones left standing. As such, regulatory capture becomes a mutually beneficial tool to dominant vendors and regulators alike.
There are few coincidences when lobbying is involved. Which is not to say that cybersecurity improvements aren't a good thing! But speed and mechanisms of required rollout need to be balanced. And with the numerous signatories of [0] opposing the rule and describing "unreasonable implementation timelines," it's hard to say that this is entirely done in the interest of patients.
How kind of them to require 2FA without requiring the governments to issue real 2FA tokens for use in signing / interacting. No doubt this will require some rootkit 'authenticator' app on the consumer's purchased mobile device that they are then not allowed to truly own.
You lose all your customer's data to a darknet leak? We should be taking a huge chunk out of your balance sheet.
My insurer has disclosed names, social security numbers, and ENTIRE MEDICAL CASEFILES for their entire client base more than once at this point in overlapping data breaches. Why exactly don't they owe me $10k for my trouble, or N% shares of the company? If that's too much, why do these penalties exist for knowing disclosure, if incompetence is so tolerated that knowing disclosure does no damage?
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.
AI writing makes somewhat more sense on tech blogs. Where a business' value proposition is "I am knowledgeable and reliable about computer security", it seems unwise.
PCI-DSS still takes the cake for most oppressive rules out of all the compliance frameworks. The notion that your system might become "in-scope" is one of the scariest things you have to deal with. Avoiding this designation is almost always easier than satisfying all the controls they prescribe. Stripe & friends have it really good. I don't know who their equivalents are in the health care industry but I am certain they exist.
Basically, Visa and friends externalized their own shitty security and made every other company in the land responsible for wrapping their janky hardware in electronic bubble wrap. A real security framework would’ve said “don’t make a credit card scanner so weak that it can’t survive being on the same LAN as a printer”. Instead, the whole country has to waste billions of dollars mitigating that risk for them.
Given that downgrade attacks are a massive category of attacks for network protocols, and in fact modern protocols go to great lengths to make them impossible, that doesn’t sound very bullshit at all.
As a government regime, do you want to build an effective surveillance system where health data on large numbers of suspects can be pulled into a data fusion system at the push of a button, once a judicial framework for rubber-stamping is in place? And do you want to be able to pressure vendors into not supporting certain types of research/analysis and even direct patient care that could be construed/presented as counter to the regime's goals?
Both of these are easier when smaller vendors are forced out and larger vendors are the only ones left standing. As such, regulatory capture becomes a mutually beneficial tool to dominant vendors and regulators alike.
There are few coincidences when lobbying is involved. Which is not to say that cybersecurity improvements aren't a good thing! But speed and mechanisms of required rollout need to be balanced. And with the numerous signatories of [0] opposing the rule and describing "unreasonable implementation timelines," it's hard to say that this is entirely done in the interest of patients.
[0] https://assets.ctfassets.net/opszt4tga0mx/4QrJlGP2EkCiZjgvGx... (2025)