Plan and conduct routine incident response exercises and scenarios for key personnel involved in the incident response process to prepare for responding to real-world incidents. Exercises need to test communication channels, decision making, and workflows. Conduct testing on an annual basis, at a minimum.
Conduct post-incident reviews. Post-incident reviews help prevent incident recurrence through identifying lessons learned and follow-up action.
Establish and maintain security incident thresholds, including, at a minimum, differentiating between an incident and an event. Examples can include: abnormal activity, security vulnerability, security weakness, data breach, privacy incident, etc. Review annually, or when significant enterprise changes occur that could impact this Safeguard.
Establish and maintain a penetration testing program appropriate to the size, complexity, and maturity of the enterprise. Penetration testing program characteristics include scope, such as network, web application, Application Programming Interface (API), hosted services, and physical premise controls; frequency; limitations, such as acceptable hours, and excluded attack types; point of contact information; remediation, such as how findings will be routed internally; and retrospective requirements.
Perform periodic external penetration tests based on program requirements, no less than annually. External penetration testing must include enterprise and environmental reconnaissance to detect exploitable information. Penetration testing requires specialized skills and experience and must be conducted through a qualified party. The testing may be clear box or opaque box.
Remediate penetration test findings based on the enterprise’s policy for remediation scope and prioritization.
Validate security measures after each penetration test. If deemed necessary, modify rulesets and capabilities to detect the techniques used during testing.
Perform periodic internal penetration tests based on program requirements, no less than annually. The testing may be clear box or opaque box.
Perform application layer filtering. Example implementations include a filtering proxy, application layer firewall, or gateway.
Apply secure design principles in application architectures. Secure design principles include the concept of least privilege and enforcing mediation to validate every operation that the user makes, promoting the concept of "never trust user input." Examples include ensuring that explicit error checking is performed and documented for all input, including for size, data type, and acceptable ranges or formats. Secure design also means minimizing the application infrastructure attack surface, such as turning off unprotected ports and services, removing unnecessary programs and files, and renaming or removing default accounts.
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