SOX Compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley Act)

What Is SOX?

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a U.S. federal law that regulates financial practices and corporate governance for public companies. It mandates how corporate boards and executives must interact with each other and with corporate auditors. It holds CEOs and CFOs accountable for the accuracy of financial statements. And it specifies financial reporting responsibilities, including adherence to new internal controls and procedures designed to ensure the validity of financial records.

SOX Compliance Requirements

One section, Section 404, is of particular interest to IT professionals. This section regulates the need for internal controls over how financial data is collected, managed, and reported. Companies are responsible for:

• Implementing controls that prevent misstatements on financial reports.
• Assessing risk with regard to information management systems.
• Implementing financial reporting controls.

SOX Compliance and Fraud Prevention Challenges

SOX stipulates that certain controls be in place to validate the accuracy and integrity of financial data. But adding these controls can be challenging, particularly when the data is stored in multiple applications and legacy systems. What’s more, traditional application logging, built into these systems, is unable to capture the information required to demonstrate compliance. For example, application logs fail to capture the activity around a given action (such as screens accessed by the user). Without this essential context, tracing fraudulent activities to a particular user or session is often impossible.

The Luminet Solution

Luminet fraud prevention software captures privileged- and nonprivileged-user activity across multiple applications. It records the activity in real time—screen by screen, keystroke by keystroke—creating an audit trail directly from the network. There is no need to add any controls or change a single line of code.

By providing 100 percent visibility into all user activity, Luminet helps you identify inappropriate access of financial data. You can also use Luminet’s risk-based scoring capabilities to identify suspicious or nefarious behavior, and eliminate false positives. Customizable dashboards, graphs, and reports enable your internal auditors to see the big picture at a glance and zero in on activity that puts SOX compliance at risk.

Built with Substantial Business Process Functionality

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