How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Looking 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.
yes. I think some overlap is normal, but this is not that, eg. seen:
• same pagination across hundreds of reports → 100% template output
• same auditor license everywhere → either extreme concentration or just rubber stamping
• zero exceptions across all clients → unrealistic, real audits always find something.. right?
• system descriptions pulled from marketing sites → .. copy paste
at one point you’re really looking at reports that were never really produced per each company
But who's actually buying the compliance checkbox versus the auditor relationship? If companies just wanted a template, they'd use a $500 consultant. They're paying for someone to vouch for them. That's the thing Delve was selling — and maybe selling fraudulently.
I mean it’s a template, but in theory someone went and checked stuff. Did you actually have a quarterly security team meeting? Was there minutes? Was there an invite?
Did someone actually go and confirm your role based access control matrix is up to date and user accounts have the right access? Were all of those screenshots watermarked with timestamps?
There is work to do, whether or not auditors are doing it is another question.
> "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.
> 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.
hello, 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.
Not clickbaity, but downright misleading and, for all we know about the XHR traffic, potentially malicious.
> But i need a way to marketing this intially.
Posting a site which blatantly fakes statistics, such as the ones mentioned two posts up from here, is not doing any favors.
Sending XHR requests with opaque binary data every few seconds is not doing you any favors. No information-only site has _any_ business XHR-posting opaque state every several seconds.
"Post it quickly at all costs, accuracy be damned," is not a viable strategy for a legitimate and believable site.
" 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.
fair 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.
Cybersecurity 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.
I'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.
"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.
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?
The person up the chain also isn't auditing the auditor - they're just checking that an audit exists. The signal degrades at every layer. If nobody in the chain can distinguish a real audit from a rubber stamp, "someone cares somewhere up the chain" doesn't actually rescue the system.
Probably 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.
As 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.
Most 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.
The 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.
We ran into the copy-pasted system descriptions specifically. Our security team started requiring vendors to submit a control mapping spreadsheet alongside the SOC2, basically forcing them to tie each test to their actual architecture. Weeded out a few reports that were clearly templated wholesale. Annoying extra step, but caught two vendors whose controls didn't match what they'd told us verbally.
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.
Does 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.
It's the universal de facto standard at least in North America, and nobody takes it especially seriously. About the best thing you could say for it is that it verifies that you're an actual company and not 3 raccoons in a trench coat. But if you're savvy about how you manage your auditors, you can get an attestation for 3 raccoons as well.
what 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.
This 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"
I'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".
That'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.
Since 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)?
It's complicated. In theory, SOC2 forces you to do some important stuff, like define your threat model and say "I can mitigate against the threats and prove that my mitigations are in place". The problem is always that the companies that care don't need it but are burdened with it while the companies that don't care will just checkbox their way through it. It sort of enforces a very baseline security posture, in theory, but the major win of "We've thought our security through" is more of a choice - SOC2 can't actually force you to care.
A ton of these SOC2 vendors take all of the potential good parts of SOC2 out of the equation, building the threat models for you and then you just hook up your gsuite/ github and they check boxes for you or tell you to flip a policy here or there. Delve took this to the extreme by not even asking you to flip the checkboxes.
That said, it doesn't matter if it's legit. Everyone is SOC2, and part of being SOC2 is that the vendors whose products you purchase are SOC2, so it's not a choice - you have to be SOC2 if you want to sell (industry/ product specific, but at some point it'll be clear if it applies). If your goal is security, well, SOC2 is irrelevant.
Ultimately, you'll end up having a separate compliance team to manage SOC2 and you'll actively try to keep "real security" from it because real security has to change over time. You'll encode the absolute minimum possible into your compliance for that reason so that you can easily pass every year and then, if you care about security, you'll invest in that separately.
You can get a long, long way without SOC2; virtually every prospective customer you run into that asks for a SOC2 will have an alternate on-ramp for vendors without it, and the ones that don't will sign a contingent PO on your Type I, which (again) you are guaranteed to get.
The idea that SOC2 forces you to do important stuff gets it backwards; SOC2 documents your existing practice, and demands only extremely high-level controls that you can deliver in any number of ways. Your security practice should (minimally) inform your SOC2, not the other way around.
In my mind getting a clean report required three kinds of work:
1. Work that actively improved our security posture.
2. Work that didn't change much, but made our security posture easier to understand.
3. Busy work.
I think for most companies all three kinds of work will be required, but you can also make decisions that will push the percentages around. SOC 2 required us to start doing an annual security table top exercise. You could sit down, run a scenario, run it as fast as you can, and come up with a few pre-determined "improvements" that would help if you actually had that problem in the future. Or you could sit down and really put work into it, and see what works well and what doesn't.
As an example in our last tabletop I "exfiltrated" some data from one of our servers, and challenged the team to figure out what I'd done. The easy way out would have been for someone to say "We'll look at the logs and figure it out", but instead I asked them to actually try and find it. We discovered that the sheer volume of logs for that system made them hard to work with. So we made some changes to make them easier to work with and repeated the exercise later.
It could have been busy work, but instead we got real value from it.
Tangential to this but do ISO certifications make sense or are they security theater as well?
And another question but as a consumer, is there any certification which can meaningfully try to show if people/business take their security carefully or are all things security theater in that aspect and at some point, we just have to trust the enterprise and look for other signals of security (like for example blog posts which might show a deep-dive into security for example comes to my mind)
Same as ISO 9001 circa 2003. Customers demanded it, consultants got rich rubber-stamping binders nobody read. The audit became the product. Oneleet's advice is correct but rare — most shops selling compliance hate telling you not to buy.
It’s fine for what it is: some light guardrails that attempt to nudge you towards answering “is this all just a house of cards that will obviously collapse under a light breeze”.
Getting a SOC2 doesn’t mean you’re amazing or secure or stable. If a customer says they’ll write you a fat check but they need you to have a SOC2, tell them you’ll get it within a year if they start paying. Otherwise don’t bother.
It basically shows clients that you are not doing wildly incompetent things with their data, or if you are, they can more easily sue you, since you probably lied to your auditor about it.
But it’s ultimately not up to you if you do it or not. If all of your potential clients demand it, it’s generally easier to get it than it is to get on the phone with all of your potential clients’ IT departments and explain why you don’t have it.
Depends entirely on how you run it. We went through SOC 2 Type II last year and the controls audit forced us to actually document our access provisioning process, which revealed three contractors still had prod access after offboarding. The report itself is theater; the process of getting there caught real issues we'd missed.
SOC2 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."
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.