Hisham Mir is a cybersecurity professional with 10+ years of hands-on experience and Co-Founder & CTO of SecurityWall. He leads real-world penetration testing and vulnerability research, and is an experienced bug bounty hunter.
You have a SOC 2 audit on the calendar. Your auditor has told you a penetration test will need to be part of the evidence file, and now you have somewhere between four and twelve weeks to make it happen alongside everything else in the run-up to the audit window.
NIS2
If you are reading this, the news has already reached you: NIS2 is in force, your organisation falls within scope, and one of the obligations being interpreted across every member state is regular penetration testing. The Directive itself never says the words "penetration test" but Article 21(2)
NCA ECC
Most Saudi financial institutions discover the problem the same way: they finish a SAMA compliance programme, feel done, and then learn the National Cybersecurity Authority has its own mandatory requirements they have not touched. Or the reverse they treat the NCA's controls as the whole job and miss
NCNICC
For years, Saudi Arabia's cybersecurity regulations were something most private companies could safely ignore. The National Cybersecurity Authority's rules applied to government bodies and operators of Critical National Infrastructure banks, energy, telecoms and almost everyone else watched from the sidelines. In January 2026, that changed completely,
SOC 2
There is a moment almost every B2B SaaS company hits. A major enterprise deal is moving, an investor is circling, or a regulated customer enters procurement and then the email arrives: "Please share your SOC 2 report." If you do not have one, the deal stalls, sometimes for
NCA Saudi Arabia
If you are reading about the NCA's Essential Cybersecurity Controls, there is a good chance the guidance in front of you is out of date. Most articles still describe ECC-1:2018 the original version including its control count, its five domains, and its Saudization rule. All three of
NCA Saudi Arabia
If you run a business in Saudi Arabia, the rules on cybersecurity changed at the start of 2026 and the change now reaches far more companies than before. The body behind those rules is the National Cybersecurity Authority, almost always referred to simply as the NCA. SecurityWall offers NCA ECC
SOC 2
This is an interactive, use-it-now SOC 2 compliance checklist covering all 12 control domains. Tick items as you go the progress bar tracks your completion, and each domain tells you exactly what evidence auditors look for and the single most common gap they find. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere;
ISO 27001
"SOC 2 vs ISO 27001" is one of the most-searched questions in compliance and it is usually the wrong question. People type it expecting to learn which framework is better, as if one were a stronger version of the other. They are not competing tiers of the same
SOC 2
You are about to spend $20,000 to $80,000 on a SOC 2 audit. Before you sign the engagement letter, the cheapest insurance you can buy is finding out, in advance, whether you are actually ready for it. SOC 2 audits do not refund failed attempts. Auditors do not
SOC 2
A prospective customer has asked for your SOC 2 report. Your investor's due diligence checklist requires one. Procurement at a Fortune 500 has flagged that they cannot move your contract forward without it. And the question you are now staring at possibly for the first time is what
PCI DSS
Most SaaS and fintech companies dramatically underestimate their PCI DSS scope on first contact with the standard. The pattern is consistent: a CTO or head of engineering reviews the merchant levels, sees that their company processes "fewer than 6 million transactions a year," and concludes incorrectly that they