The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is responsible for developing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), the gold standard cybersecurity framework. NIST Special Publication 800-53 operates as one of the forefront cybersecurity guidelines for federal agencies in the United States to maintain their information security systems. These guidelines protect the system's security and the sensitive data of the citizens being served.
NIST SP 800-53 has had five revisions and comprises over 1000 controls. This catalog of security controls allows federal government agencies the recommended security and privacy controls for federal information systems and organizations to protect against potential security issues and cyber attacks. Here, we will look at the 18 NIST 800-53 control families and give a general overview of the list of NIST standards.
The AC Control Family consists of security requirements detailing system logging. This includes who has access to what assets and reporting capabilities like account management, system privileges, and remote access logging to determine when users can access the system and their level of access.
The AU control family comprises security controls related to an organization’s audit capabilities. This includes audit policies and procedures, audit logging, audit report generation, and protection of audit information.
The control sets in the AT Control Family are specific to your security training and procedures, including security training records.
CM controls are specific to an organization’s configuration management policies. These include a baseline configuration that will operate as the basis for future builds or changes to information systems, information system component inventories, and a security impact analysis control.
The CP control family includes controls specific to an organization's contingency plan in case a cybersecurity event should occur. These include controls like contingency plan testing, updating, training, backups, and system reconstitution.
IA controls are specific to an organization's identification and authentication policies. This includes the identification and authentication of organizational and non-organizational users and the management of those systems.
IR controls are specific to an organization’s incident response policies and procedures. This includes incident response training, testing, monitoring, reporting, and response plans.
The MA controls in NIST 800-53 revision five detail requirements for maintaining organizational systems and the tools used.
The Media Protection control family includes controls specific to access, marking, storage, transport policies, sanitization, and defined organizational media use.
PS controls relate to how an organization protects its personnel through position risk, personnel screening, termination, transfers, sanctions, and access agreements.
The Physical and Environmental Protection control family is implemented to protect systems, buildings, and supporting infrastructure against physical threats. These controls include physical access authorizations, monitoring, visitor records, emergency shutoff, power, lighting, fire protection, and water damage protection.
The NIST SP 800-53 control PL family is specific to an organization's security planning policies and must address the purpose, scope, roles, responsibilities, management commitment, coordination among entities, and organizational compliance.
The PM control family is specific to who manages your cybersecurity program and how it operates. This includes but is not limited to, a critical infrastructure plan, information security program plan, plan of action milestones and processes, risk management strategy, and enterprise architecture.
The RA control family relates to an organization’s risk assessment policies and vulnerability scanning capabilities. An integrated cyber risk management solution like CyberStrong can help streamline and automate your NIST 800 53 compliance efforts.
The Security Assessment and Authorization control family includes controls that supplement the execution of cybersecurity assessments, authorizations, continuous monitoring, plan of actions and milestones, and system interconnections.
The SC control family is responsible for systems and communications protection procedures. This includes boundary protection, protection of information at rest, collaborative computing devices, cryptographic protection, denial of service protection, and many others.
The SI control family correlates to controls that protect the system and information integrity. This control family includes NIST SI 7, which involves flaw remediation, malicious code protection, information system monitoring, security alerts, software, firmware integrity, and spam protection.
The SA control family correlates with controls that protect allocated resources and an organization’s system development life cycle. This includes information system documentation controls, development configuration management controls, and developer security testing and evaluation controls.
A cyber risk management solution like CyberStrong can help streamline and harmonize an organization's cybersecurity efforts across multiple standards and guidelines, saving teams time, energy, and resources to comply continuously.
Learn about NIST 800-53 Rev 5 here.
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