Regulation: Sarbanes–Oxley Act and accounting standards, COSO,
COBIT®, SAS
Abbreviation: SOX
Governs these parties: all publicly traded companies in the USA, as
well as any wholly-owned subsidiaries and foreign companies that are
both publicly traded and do business with the USA. Any accounting firms
that are auditing companies bound by SOX compliance are also, by proxy,
obliged to comply
Enforced by: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
SOX compliance lays out a set of requirements for annual audits to assess and protect shareholders in financial & IT public companies by securing their access controlling data management and preventing breaches and fraud. SOX describes a course of action to take in order to show evidence of accurate, secured financial reporting and it provides companies with a way of improving their data security whilst simultaneously helping to restore public confidence, reducing chances of falling victim to a data breach.
The rest of this document is designed to help our community understand SOX better by outlining the following information:
How it relates to cybersecurity
To comply with SOX, you will effectively have to model your security on the Data-Centric Audit and Protection model. This model requires you to understand where your sensitive data is, who has access to it, and what users are doing with it. SOX audits require that strict auditing, logging, and monitoring take place across all internal controls, network and database activity, login activity, account activity, user activity, and information access.
It includes all of the company’s IT assets, such as computers, hardware, software, and all the other electronic devices that can access financial data.
Companies need to ensure that:
- they have a way to locate where sensitive data is, see who has access to it, and monitor user interactions with it
- in the case of a breach, the company needs to be able to take action to remediate it in an effective and timely manner
- only the right people have access to sensitive financial information, both physically and electronically, by limiting access and implementing controls on access
- data is backed up so that, in the event of an incident, data loss is minimalized
- whenever there are IT environment changes, records are kept of the changes, and the appropriate security is maintained
How Coro handles compliance for you
At Coro, we've done the research thoroughly and regularly track updates to the regulation in order to ensure that you are implementing best practices in the areas we cover when we're protecting your systems.
The following table outlines the requirements described by SOX that Coro implements in conjunction with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
Disclaimer: this table does not guarantee that your organization is compliant with these regulations. As a best practice, seek assistance from a certified auditor when completing your analysis.
|
Category |
Requirement |
How Coro does it |
| Cloud Security & Privacy | Malware and ransomware injection | Detects and remediates malware and ransomware files in cloud drives |
| Cloud app account takeover | Monitors access to cloud apps and user/admin activities on them | |
|
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) |
Enforces multi-factor authentication on cloud app access | |
|
Data governance over cloud drives |
Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for regulatorily and business-sensitive data |
|
| Data Encryption | Safeguards sensitive information against unauthorized use and leakage | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Email Security & Privacy | Malware and ransomware injection | Detection of malware and ransomware in email attachments |
| Identity spoofing | Detection of social engineering attacks based on adaptive identity monitoring | |
| Generic and spear phishing | Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on email content analysis | |
| Embedded links to malicious URLs | Detects and remediates embedded links to malicious servers | |
| DLP over outgoing/incoming email | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for regulatorily and business-sensitive data | |
| Business email compromise (BEC) | Scans business email, detects and protects against social engineering attacks | |
| Email account takeover | Email attacks from within the organization | |
| Encryption of email during transmission | Email is encrypted during transit between the sender and the recipient | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Endpoint Security & Privacy | Antivirus (AV) |
Detects and remediates files with high-risk content based on their signatures |
| ATP (NGAV) | Behavioral analysis-based detection of processes exhibiting high-risk behaviors | |
| Data recovery | Secured local snapshots of data | |
| DLP on endpoint devices | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for regulatorily and business-sensitive data | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Data Governance | Data distribution governance and role management | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for data defined as sensitive by regulations |
| Security and business specific data monitoring | Monitors (security-wise and business-wise) sensitive data such as passwords, certificates, source code, proprietary data, etc. | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing |