MIPSA

Table of Content

Massachusetts Information Privacy and Security Act (MIPSA)

Regulation: Massachusetts Information Privacy and Security Act
Abbreviation: MIPSA
Governs these parties: all organizations processing information on residents or those doing business in Massachusetts
Enforced by: the Office of the Attorney General (OAG)

The Massachusetts privacy act requires that every person that owns or licenses personal information about a resident of the Commonwealth must develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive information security program.

Complying with the MIPSA provides consumers with rights of access, deletion, correction, portability, and opt-out in relation to their personal data. It would, among other things require data controllers to publish a privacy notice for data subjects; require registration of data brokers, and require risk assessments for certain types of processing.

The rest of this document is designed to help our community understand MIPSA better by outlining the following information:

How it relates to cybersecurity

Amongst the provisions are the security requirements of all governed entities to:

develop policies and procedures relating to employees and data. This should include information regarding disciplinary procedures if an employee is found in violation of the data security program.
develop techniques to avoid security failures
sufficiently encrypt sensitive data

How Coro handles compliance for you

At Coro, we’ve done the research thoroughly and regularly track updates to the regulation in order to ensure that you are implementing best practices in the areas we cover when we’re protecting your systems.

The following table outlines the requirements described by MIPSA that Coro implements in conjunction with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

Disclaimer: this table does not guarantee that your organization is compliant with these regulations. As a best practice, seek assistance from a certified auditor when completing your analysis.

Category	Requirement	How Coro does it
Cloud Security & Privacy	Malware and ransomware injection	Detects and remediates malware and ransomware files in cloud drives
	Cloud app account takeover	Monitors access to cloud apps and user/admin activities on them
	Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)	Enforces multi-factor authentication on cloud app access
	Data governance over cloud drives	Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for regulatorily and business-sensitive data
	Audit and activity logs	Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing
Email Security & Privacy	Generic and spear phishing	Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on email content analysis
	Identity spoofing	Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on adaptive identity monitoring
	Malware and ransomware injection	Detects and remediates malware and ransomware in email attachments
	Embedded links to malicious URLs	Detects and remediates embedded links to malicious servers
	DLP over outgoing/incoming email	Encrypts emails before they are sent, which are then decrypted by their recipients at the other end.
	Business email compromise (BEC)	Scans business email, detects and protects against social engineering attacks
	Email account takeover	Protects against email attacks from within the organization
	Audit and activity logs	Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing
Endpoint Security & Privacy	Antivirus (AV)	Detects and remediates files with high-risk content based on their signatures
	ATP (NGAV)	Detects and remediates processes exhibiting high-risk behaviors with behavioral analysis
	Data recovery	Stores local snapshots of data
	DLP on endpoint devices	Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for business-sensitive data and data defined as sensitive by regulations
	Audit and activity logs	Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing
Data Governance	Data distribution governance and role management	Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for data defined as sensitive by regulations
	PII monitoring	Monitor for personally identifiable information, or PII, is information that can be used to identify, contact, or distinguish one unique person from another
	Audit and activity logs	Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing