Is Cyber Driving the CCO-Board Relationship?

cybersecurity

We begin this week with yet another compliance benchmarking report, this time from Navex: a deep look at how compliance officers engage with senior management, and whether cybersecurity concerns, rather than anti-corruption, might be driving the board’s attention to compliance these days.  Navex published the report late last week. It polled more than 1,300 compliance…

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A Closer Look at SOC Audits

audit

Anyone involved in cybersecurity or privacy compliance knows that one handy tool to assess your vendor risks is a SOC audit. Now, at long last, we have a report that explores an important question: Just what do all those SOC audit reports actually examine, anyway? The report comes from CBiz MHM, a mid-sized accounting and…

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NY DFS Strikes Again on Cyber Fails

cybersecurity

New York state regulators are at it again, serving up yet another enforcement action over poor cybersecurity practices that can serve as a quick case-study for the rest of us trying to figure out a sustainable way forward on cyber compliance issues.  The company in question this time is OneMain Financial Group, a publicly traded…

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More Help on Key Cyber Controls

key controls

Some interesting news for internal audit and cybersecurity professionals: new research has identified five key controls deemed to have the greatest effect in reducing the chance of (and damage from) a cybersecurity attack. The research comes from insurance giant Marsh McLennan, which operates a Cyber Risk Analytics Center that helps Marsh understand how to price…

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Another Cyber Disclosure Sanction

cybersecurity

Words matter in SEC filings. The Securities and Exchange Commission gave us another example of that point recently when it fined a technology company $3 million for misleading disclosures about a ransomware attack the company had suffered — and the confusion arose from how the company used the word “could.”  The company in question is…

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More on Managing ‘ChatGPT Risk’

ChatGPT

Internal auditors, compliance officers, and risk managers looking for more perspective on how artificial intelligence might affect your lives, look no further. A cybersecurity research institute has published a fascinating paper on the potential risks from ChatGPT, with lots of unsettling implications for risk assurance professionals. The paper, titled “I, Chatbot,” comes from Recorded Future,…

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Help on Supply Chain Cyber Risks

supply chain

I hadn’t noticed this until now, but we have fresh help for audit and risk managers worried about cybersecurity risks in the supply chain: CISA, the top cybersecurity regulator in the United States, has published a short guide on how small and medium-sized businesses can navigate that challenge. CISA released the guide last week —…

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FINRA Talks Cyber Risks

cybersecurity

FINRA, the regulator for broker-dealer firms that every other compliance professional should follow anyway, has given us yet another piece of nifty guidance: its annual report on regulatory examinations, brimming with advice about risks related to cybersecurity, anti-money laundering, and other issues.  Like most other financial regulators, FINRA examines the compliance programs of businesses under…

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SEC Reminders on Identity Theft

cybersecurity

The Securities and Exchange Commission has published a review of financial firms’ identity theft programs, in case anyone is looking for helpful hints and tips on how to strengthen your own program. Most of the SEC’s advice, however, boils down to a company sincerely thinking about its risks here. The advice came in the form…

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Getting a Better Grip on IT Controls

control environment

Today I want to circle back to last week’s collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. One allegation is that FTX’s now-former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, engineered a “back door” into the company’s financial systems so that he could execute transactions without review. My question: would an audit of internal controls over financial reporting catch something like that? …

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