Is Vulnerability Scanning Required for SOC2 Compliance? Written on Jun 7, 2023. Posted in Informational.

If your organization handles customer data, you've probably heard of SOC2. Maybe your sales team keeps getting asked for a SOC2 report on calls, or a big client just made it a requirement for renewing your contract. Either way, you need to get compliant, and vulnerability scanning is one of the pieces people tend to overlook until an auditor asks about it.

 

SOC2 was developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). It defines criteria for how organizations should handle security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. These are called the Trust Services Criteria. To pass a SOC2 audit, you have to show that you've implemented controls around these criteria and that they actually work.

 

Several of the Common Criteria controls deal directly with vulnerability management. Here's how they connect to scanning.

 

This control says you need to evaluate whether your internal controls are present and doing what they're supposed to do. That's a broad mandate, but vulnerability scans give you concrete evidence for the security side. A scan shows you what's misconfigured, what's missing patches, and where the gaps are in your systems and applications. Without that data, you're guessing.

When something is broken or missing, CC4.2 says the right people need to know about it quickly so it can be fixed. Scan results feed directly into this. They produce a list of findings with severity ratings, which makes it straightforward to route issues to the team responsible and track remediation. Auditors like seeing that workflow documented.

New CVEs get published constantly. A server that was fine last month might have a critical vulnerability today because a new exploit was disclosed. CC7.1 requires you to have detection procedures in place for exactly this kind of thing. Running scans on a regular schedule (weekly or monthly, depending on your environment) is one of the most direct ways to satisfy this control.

This one is about watching for unusual activity: unauthorized access attempts, unexpected configuration changes, suspicious network traffic. Vulnerability scans overlap with this because they can flag things like open ports that shouldn't be open, or services running that nobody remembers installing. That kind of finding often points to something worth investigating further.

 

None of this is optional if you want to pass a SOC2 audit. Auditors will ask how you identify vulnerabilities, how often you scan, and what you do with the results. Having a scanning program in place gives you clear answers to all of those questions.

 

The practical takeaway: set up recurring vulnerability scans, make sure the results go to someone who acts on them, and keep records. That alone covers a meaningful chunk of what CC4.1, CC4.2, CC7.1, and CC7.2 require.