Shakepay, a Montreal-based technology company that enables Canadians to buy and earn bitcoins, has gained the System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 1 security Attestation.
SOC is an audit of a company's controls put in place to ensure the security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy of customers' data.
These five qualities make up the Trust Services Criteria (TSC) set by the Auditing Standard Board of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) for use when firms are being audited.
Therefore, SOC 2 Type 1 is a certification issued by an auditing firm to an organization after the design of the security processes of the organization has been assessed.
To gain the badge, Shakepay said it was audited based on AICPA's Auditing Standard Board's TSC.
The Bitcoin company said it had worked tirelessly “these last few months” with auditors from A-LIGN, a compliance, cybersecurity , cyber risk and privacy provider, to gain the attestation.
Shakepay exceeded the stringent requirements in most categories, the firm added.
In a statement, Tony Carella, Shakepay's Head of Security, said the attestation was the first step on a continued path to verify, on behalf of its customers, the security standards to which the company holds itself.
“At Shakepay, our security mission is to be the industry leader in securing our customers' funds, personal information and accounts,” Carella said.
“We want to be the most trustworthy service in the industry. To us, trust goes hand-in-hand with verification,” he added.
What Are the Various SOC Audits?
There are various types of SOC audits, ranging from SOC 1 Type 1 and 2 to SOC 2 Type I and 2 and even SOC 3.
According to David Dunkelberger, a Principal at I.S. Partners, a certified public accountant firm, the SOC 1 Type II report addresses the design and testing of an organization's control system over a period of time, which is most often six months, as opposed to the specific date used in a SOC 1 Type I report.
“This type of report [the SOC 1 Type 11] is far more rigorous and intensive than Type I, as it covers a greater span of time and requires that your auditors [to] perform a more thorough investigation of your system’s design and processes,” Dunkelberger wrote in a blog post on the company’s website.
Additionally, StrongDM, a people-first access platform, noted that while SOC 2 Type 1 assesses the design of security processes at a specific point in time, the SOC 2 Type 2 report assesses how effective those controls are over time by observing operations for six months.
SOC 3 reports on the same information as SOC 2 but in a format intended for a more general audience, StrongDM further explained.
“It is important to note that pursuing SOC 2 is voluntary and not necessarily motivated by compliance or other regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS),” wrote Schuyler Brown in a blogpost. Brown is the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of StrongDM.
Brown further explained, “Many software-as-service and cloud computing organizations, such as IT-managed service providers, want to demonstrate that they are properly protecting data within their data centers and information systems.
“It is also common for customers (known as user entities in SOC terminology) to reach out to partners and request results from an auditor's tests.”
