Each month, Reciprocity highlights companies that have earned compliance certifications for information security frameworks. Here’s our June 2020 roundup of compliance news from around the United States, and around the world.

Beginning this month, Reciprocity will highlight companies that have earned compliance certifications for information security frameworks. Here’s our May 2020 roundup of compliance news from around the United States, and around the world.

While keeping data safe from modern cyberthreats is difficult enough, you also have to keep in mind compliance with common regulations, i.e., ensuring your company’s compliance to SOX, which deals with transparency in disclosures from public companies. Nowadays, it’s not enough for businesses to rely on dismissive financial documents that satisfy the intermittent audit; you need to level up your game, and create detailed day-to-day records of activities.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) was signed into law as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009. The HITECH Act encourages the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) by healthcare providers and their business associates.

Regulatory compliance is continuously evolving, which makes it increasingly imperative that everyone involved in the Compliance Management System (CMS) understand their responsibilities. Various sectors mandate oversight, including healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity. It is also a foundational business practice to safeguard company reputation and demonstrate integrity to consumers and the public. Compliance management is a top-down system, like most workplace cultures and business processes.

COVID-19 has us reeling from health, social, and economic shocks, but this isn’t our first global crisis. It is, however, the first in which cybercrime plays a starring role. The world has faced several pandemics in the past 100 years—several influenza pandemics including swine flu (H1N1) and Avian, or bird, flu, and HIV/AIDS—as well as economic depression and a number of recessions.

If the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused your enterprise to make a sudden, rapid switch from an on-premises-centered business model to a diverse, dispersed network of ad-hoc home offices, you may have let security and privacy measures slide a bit.

A social compliance audit, also known as a social audit, is an effective way to determine if an organization is complying with socially responsible principles. Social compliance refers to how a company protects the health and safety as well as the rights of its employees, the community, and the environment where it operates in addition to the lives and communities of workers in its distribution chain and its supply chain.

Every week, dozens of data breaches are reported with some reaching into the tens, or even hundreds of millions of individuals impacted. Customers and regulators alike are increasingly concerned about the information security programs of organizations and how they plan to prevent security incidents and safeguard sensitive data.

The most recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines have been updated for passwords in section 800-63B. The document no longer recommends combinations of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. Yet most companies and systems still mandate these complexity requirements for passwords. What gives?