Practitioner-depth analysis across federal and private compliance: FISMA and NIST RMF, FedRAMP, CMMC, federal AI governance, SOC 2, AI governance, cybersecurity, and GRC engineering. Written by a CPA, CISSP, CISA with Big 4 audit experience.
When was the last time a human attacker tested whether your vulnerability scan findings are actually exploitable? Not a scanner running automated checks against a database. A certified ethical hacker chaining vulnerabilities together, testing business...
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Which ChatGPT plan does your organization use? Not the plan the IT department approved. The plan your clinical staff actually uses. The one a medical assistant discovered through a colleague. The one a billing specialist...
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Before the 2013 HIPAA Omnibus Rule, Business Associates operated in a regulatory gray zone. Covered entities signed agreements. Vendors accepted them. HHS had no direct enforcement authority over the vendors themselves. When Advocate Medical Group...
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When ISO 27001 introduced Annex A revisions in 2022, organizations that had built their programs on the original control set spent months remapping evidence. The frameworks did not change materially. The structure changed. Control numbering...
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Most compliance teams treat incident response evidence as a documentation exercise: write the plan, run the annual tabletop, file the sign-in sheet. SOC 2 auditors evaluate incident response under three distinct criteria: CC7.2 (detection), CC7.3...
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Eighty-nine days. The average window between quarterly vulnerability scans where new threats go undetected. During those 89 days, automated scanning tools probe every internet-facing IP address continuously Verizon 2024 DBIR. CISA adds entries to its...
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In 2003, the SQL Slammer worm exploited a vulnerability Microsoft had patched six months earlier. The worm infected tens of thousands of servers in minutes. The organizations breached had scanning tools and access to the...
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Most security incidents never qualify as breaches. The vast majority sit in a classification zone where the difference between "event" and "incident" determines whether your response team activates, your MTTD clock starts, and your documentation...
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Organization A tests its incident response plan annually. The team runs a tabletop in January, files the evidence, and returns to regular operations. By July, three engineers have left, the SIEM alert classifications have changed,...
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The Slack notification reads: "#critical-security: RANSOMWARE DETECTED ON FILE-SVR-03." Twelve seconds later, the CTO calls the security analyst. The security analyst calls the IT director. The IT director calls the CEO. The CEO asks one...
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Every tabletop exercise I have facilitated in the last four years reveals the same failure point. The technical response is rehearsed. Contain the ransomware. Isolate the systems. Restore from backups. The breakdown occurs at the...
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When your SIEM generates an alert at 3 AM, what criteria does your analyst use to decide whether it is Critical, High, Medium, or Low? Not which label they choose. Which documented criteria produce the...
Read the GuideOne compliance analysis per week from Josef Kamara, CPA, CISSP, CISA. Federal and private compliance, written for practitioners.