alt Hacker NewsThere's a compliance angle to this that nobody's talking about. Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and HIPAA require audit trails and evidence retention. A lot of that evidence lives at URLs. When a vendor's security documentation, a published incident response, or a compliance attestation disappears from the web and can't be archived, you've got a gap in your audit trail that no auditor is going to be happy about.
I've seen companies fail compliance reviews because a third-party vendor's published security policy that they referenced in their own controls no longer exists at the URL they cited. The web being unarchivable isn't just a cultural loss. It's becoming a real operational problem for anyone who has to prove to an auditor that something was true at a specific point in time.
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At some point Insurance is going to require companies to obtain paper copies of any documentation/policies, precisely to avoid this kind of situation. It may take a while to get there though. It'll probably take a couple of big insurance losses before that happens.
> Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and HIPAA require audit trails and evidence retention
Sidebar:
Having been part of multiple SOC audits at large financial firms, I can say that nothing brings adults closer to physical altercations in a corporate setting than trying to define which jobs are "critical".
- The job that calculates the profit and loss for the firm, definitely critical
- The job that cleans up the logs for the job above, is that critical?
- The job that monitors the cleaning up of the logs, is that critical too?
These are simple examples but it gets complex very quickly and engineering, compliance and legal don't always agree.
I hate to say this, but this account seems like it’s run by an AI tool of some kind (maybe OpenClaw)? Every comment has the same repeatable pattern, relatively recent account history, most comments are hard or soft sell ads for https://www.awsight.com/. Kind of ironic given what’s being commented on here.
I hope I’m wrong, but my bot paranoia is at all time highs and I see these patterns all throughout HN these days.
https://www.page-vault.com/ These guys exist to solve that problem.
Perhaps those companies should have performed verified backups of third-party vendor's published security policies into a secure enclave with paired keys with the auditor, to keep a trail of custody.
> I've seen companies fail compliance reviews because a third-party vendor's published security policy that they referenced in their own controls no longer exists at the URL they cited.
Seriously? What kind of auditor would "fail" you over this? That doesn't sound right. That would typically be a finding and you would scramble to go appease your auditor through one process or another, or reach out to the vendor, etc, but "fail"? Definitely doesn't sound like a SOC2 audit, at least.
Also, this has never particularly hard to solve for me (obviously biased experience, so I wonder if this is just a bubble thing). Just ask companies for actual docs, don't reference urls. That's what I've typically seen, you get a copy of their SOC2, pentest report, and controls, and you archive them yourself. Why would you point at a URL? I've actually never seen that tbh and if a company does that it's not surprising that they're "failing" their compliance reviews. I mean, even if the web were more archivable, how would reliance on a URL be valid? You'd obviously still need to archive that content anyway?
Maybe if you use a tool that you don't have a contract with or something? I feel like I'm missing something, or this is something that happens in fields like medical that I have no insight into.
This doesn't seem like it would impact compliance at all tbh. Or if it does, it's impacting people who could have easily been impacted by a million other issues.
Your experience isn't normal and I seriously question it unless there was some sort of criminal activity being investigated or there was known negligence. I worked for a decent sized MSP and have been through crytptolock scenarios.
Insurance pays as long as you aren't knowingly grossly negligent. You can even say "yes, these systems don't meet x standard and we are working on it" and be ok because you acknowledged that you were working on it.
Your boss and your bosses boss tell you "we have to do this so we don't get fucked by insurance if so and so happens" but they are either ignorant, lying, or just using that to get you to do something.
I've seen wildly out of date and unpatched systems get paid out because it was a "necessary tradeoff" between security and a hardship to the business to secure it.
I've actually never seen a claim denied and I've seen some pretty fuckin messy, outdated, unpatched legacy shit.
Bringing a system to compliance can reasonably take years. Insurance would be worthless without the "best effort" clause.
It's interesting to think about this in terms of something like Ars Technica's recent publishing of an article with fake (presumably LLM slop) quotes that they then took down. The big news sites are increasingly so opaque, how would you even know if they were rewriting or taking articles down after the fact?
And for this we need cheapo and fast WORM, 100 TB/whatever archiving solutions.
If your soc2 or hipaa references the internet archive, you probably deserve to fail.
This is new to me, so I did a quick search for a few examples of such documents.
The very first result was a 404
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/reports/
The jokes write themselves.