Compliance assessments work backwards from your audit. We map your environment against the specific controls auditors check, identify the gaps, and give you a remediation plan that closes them — so the audit week is paperwork, not panic.
What is a Regulatory & Compliance Assessment?
A regulatory and compliance assessment measures your organization’s environment, processes, and documentation against the specific controls required by an applicable regulation — HIPAA, PCI DSS, GLBA, NAIC, SOC 2, or others — and identifies the gaps you’ll need to close before an audit.
It is not the audit itself. It’s the prep work that makes the audit smooth: working backwards from “what an auditor will demand” to a defensible position that can withstand line-by-line scrutiny.
Why pre-audit work matters
Most audit failures aren’t surprises. They’re predictable from months in advance — the controls were known, the evidence was missing, the policies were outdated, the implementation drifted from the documentation. The audit just made the gap visible.
Pre-audit assessment exists to find those gaps when there’s still time to fix them. The gap categories we see most often:
- Documentation drift — policies that no longer match operational reality, or operational practices not reflected in policy
- Evidence absence — controls that exist but lack the artifacts auditors want to see (logs, approval records, training completions)
- Scope confusion — uncertainty about which systems are in-scope for a specific regulation, leading to under-protection or over-spend
- Control implementation gaps — controls designed but not fully rolled out across the in-scope environment
- Compensating control documentation — alternative controls in place but not formally documented as compensating
Each of these is fixable with lead time. Each becomes a finding without it.
CyberBullet’s methodology
1. Scope Definition
We start by precisely defining the scope of the assessment: which regulation(s), which environments, which business units. Scope drift is the most common source of compliance trouble; getting it explicit up front saves significant rework.
2. Control Mapping
We map every applicable control from the regulation against your existing environment. For each control: does it exist, is it implemented correctly, is there documented evidence, is it operating effectively.
3. Evidence Review
We review the evidence package as an auditor would — looking not just for the existence of artifacts but for their quality (recent enough, specific enough, signed off by the right people). Evidence gaps are flagged with specific remediation guidance.
4. Gap Prioritization
Not all gaps are equal. We prioritize based on: audit-finding likelihood (would an auditor actually flag this), remediation effort, dependencies on other gap closures, and quick-win candidates closable in 30 days.
5. Remediation Roadmap
For each prioritized gap, we provide: specific remediation steps, owner recommendation, effort estimate, evidence-creation guidance, and acceptance criteria (how you’ll know it’s actually closed).
6. Mock Audit (Optional)
For organizations approaching a formal audit, we can run a mock audit — walking through the control set as your auditor will, identifying remaining issues, and rehearsing the responses to common follow-up questions. The mock audit eliminates surprises during the real one.
Regulations we assess against
- HIPAA Security Rule, Privacy Rule, and Breach Notification Rule
- PCI DSS 4.0 — full QSA-comparable assessment
- GLBA Safeguards Rule (16 CFR Part 314)
- NAIC Insurance Data Security Model Law (and state variants)
- SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria (Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, Privacy)
- NYDFS Part 500 (financial services)
- CCPA / CPRA for California consumer data
- FFIEC for banks and credit unions
- NERC CIP for electric utilities
- CMMC (in-scope for DoD contractors)
Who this is for
- Organizations preparing for an upcoming compliance audit (PCI, HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II)
- Companies subject to multiple overlapping regulations needing a unified view of compliance posture
- Organizations recovering from an audit finding — pre-audit assessment closes the gaps before the next attestation cycle
- M&A integrations where the acquired entity has different regulatory exposure
- Any organization where compliance has been someone’s part-time job and needs structured catch-up
Our methodology
Every engagement runs through the same six phases. Manual validation isn't a finishing step — it's the product.
Scope & Authorize
We define the engagement boundary precisely before testing starts — in-scope assets, out-of-bounds targets, testing windows, and emergency-stop procedures.
- Written authorization letters exchanged before any packet leaves our infrastructure
- Signal / Slack channel established for real-time findings during the engagement
- Explicit rules of engagement reviewed with legal, IT, and business stakeholders
Passive Reconnaissance
Before a single packet touches your infrastructure, we map your external footprint using public sources only — DNS, CT logs, code repos, internet-wide scan data.
- Typically discovers 15-30% more attack surface than the client originally provided
- Certificate transparency, BGP, and GitHub exposure reporting
- OSINT profile for social engineering vectors if in scope
Active Discovery
We enumerate live services across in-scope assets — ports, software versions, auth mechanisms, and protocol configurations — correlated against current vuln data.
- Hand-tuned scanning profiles — not the default Nessus run
- Protocol-level inspection for TLS, SSH, SMB, Kerberos, LDAP
- Service fingerprinting to ground truth before any exploitation
Manual Validation
Every potential issue is validated by hand before it makes the report. No CVE-dumping. No false positives. This is what separates the engagement from a scan.
- Manual exploitation attempts for any finding of High severity or above
- Business-logic testing on top of the technical layer
- Chained vulnerabilities analyzed as a single attack path
Exploitation & Impact
For confirmed vulnerabilities with attacker value, we attempt exploitation to prove impact — not just that a CVE applies, but what it gets you.
- Proof-of-exploit captured for every confirmed critical finding
- Pivot paths mapped to the actual crown-jewel data
- Interim notification inside 24 hours for anything critical
Report & Remediate
Every finding is paired with severity rated on real exploitability, reproducible proof-of-exploit, and remediation guidance your team can ship this sprint.
- Executive summary and technical deep-dive in a single report
- Findings mapped to CIS, NIST CSF, and relevant compliance families
- Retest included — we confirm the fix before we close the finding
What you walk away with
Frameworks we map to
Findings ship mapped to the control families your regulators and auditors actually check. Governance clients use these crosswalks directly in their program documentation.
- CIS Controls v8
- NIST CSF 2.0 / 800-53
- PCI DSS 4.0
- HIPAA Security Rule
- SOC 2 Type II
- OWASP ASVS
Questions we get asked
Are you a QSA / accredited auditor?
We are not a certifying body — we don't issue PCI Reports on Compliance, sign HIPAA attestations, or grant SOC 2 reports. What we do is the work that makes your formal audit smooth: gap analysis against the actual controls, remediation planning, evidence package preparation, and mock audits. Most clients use us pre-audit; their formal QSA or auditor handles the certification itself.
Which regulations do you assess against?
HIPAA Security Rule and Privacy Rule, PCI DSS 4.0 (with QSA-comparable rigor), GLBA Safeguards Rule, NAIC Insurance Data Security Model Law (and state-by-state variants), SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria, FFIEC guidance for financial institutions, NERC CIP for utilities, and state-level breach laws (CCPA, NYDFS Part 500, Texas DIR, etc.).
How is this different from a penetration test?
A pentest tests technical security from an attacker's perspective — what could they actually do against your environment. A compliance assessment tests against a control framework — does your environment meet specific regulatory requirements. Most compliance frameworks require pentests as one component of overall compliance, but pentests alone don't make you compliant. You need both.
What if we have findings we can't fix before the audit?
We help you document compensating controls — alternative measures that achieve the regulation's intent through different means. QSAs and auditors accept compensating controls when they're documented properly with justification, equivalent risk reduction, and management acknowledgment. The trick is getting the documentation right; we've seen well-designed controls fail audits because the paperwork wasn't there.
How long does a compliance assessment take?
Depends on scope. A focused assessment (one regulation, mid-size environment) typically runs 4-6 weeks. Multi-regulation assessments or large enterprise environments take 8-12 weeks. Quarterly maintenance assessments (after the initial gap closure) are typically 1-2 weeks each.