In this particular case it was worthless. If you have known vulnerabilities and you deprioritize that work to waste time on soc2, and get hacked because of it… soc2 was worthless. Because the whole point is security assurance. When you get hacked you’ve proved the opposite of security assurance.
But also you gotta have the balls to stand up to the guy pushing soc2 and say. No. There are known vulnerabilities. We are patching those first then we are doing soc2. The way I frame it is “we know we have critical vulnerabilities, we don’t need to go hunting for more till we fix them. Once we fix them we go looking for other ways to improve security posture”
And if the ceo still insists (big client requires it so we’re doing soc2 simultaneously) you say fine, then hire a security consultant so we can go twice as fast. And if he refuses you quit because fuck that place.
Maybe the org prioritized poorly and sucks overall, but that doesn’t mean SOC2 or compliance generally is worthless.