NIST revises guidance on security, privacy assessments
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The publication provides guidelines for building security and privacy assessment plans as well as procedures for assessing the effectiveness of security and privacy controls used in information systems and organizations.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has revised Special Publication 800-53A, Assessing Security and Privacy Controls in Federal Information Systems and Organizations: Building Effective Assessment Plans. This fourth revision contains significant changes to the 2010 version of the publication in content and format, according to NIST.
The publication is intended to provide guidelines for building security and privacy assessment plans as well as a comprehensive set of procedures for assessing security and privacy controls used in information systems and organizations.
The guidelines have been developed to help achieve more secure information systems within the federal government by:
- Enabling more consistent, comparable and repeatable assessments.
- Promoting a better understanding of risks resulting from the operation and use of federal information systems.
- Facilitating more cost-effective assessments of security and privacy controls.
- Creating more complete, reliable, and trustworthy information to support risk management decisions, reciprocity of assessment results, information sharing, and compliance to federal laws and policies.
Based on feedback from federal agencies that have conducted actual assessments as part of the risk management framework process, NIST made improvements in current security assessment procedures, including:
- Clarification of terminology.
- Expansion of the number of potential assessment methods and objects on a per-control basis.
- A simpler decomposition of assessment objects to align more closely with security control statements.
The changes should result in significant improvements in the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of control assessments for federal agencies, which NIST said will give senior leaders the information they need to understand the security and privacy of their organizations and to be able to make credible, risk-based information security and privacy decisions.
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