Threat identification

The organization shall ensure that clear persons are assigned to incident management responsibilities, e.g. handling the first response for incidents.

Incident management personnel need to be instructed and trained to understand the organization's priorities in dealing with security incidents.

A process for reporting incidents is maintained to help staff report incidents efficiently and consistently.

Things to report as an incident include e.g.:

• unauthorized access to data / premises
• action against security guidelines
• suspected security issue (e.g. phishing, malware infection)
• data system outage
• accidental or intentional destruction / alteration of data
• lost or stolen device
• compromised password
• lost physical identifier (e.g. keychain, smart card, smart sticker)
• suspected security weakness (e.g. on utilized data system or other procedures)

The personnel guidelines emphasize the obligation to report security incidents as soon as possible in accordance with the agreed process. The instructions also describe other operations in the event of an incident (e.g. recording seen error messages and other details).

Organisation should have processes for ensuring that conflicting responsibilities are segregated to reduce opportunities for misuse of the organization’s assets.

Care should be taken e.g. in relation to a single person being able to process data without detection. Often also separating the initiation of an event from its authorization is a good practice.

When direct segregation of duties is hard to achieve, the following principles can be utilized:

• High-level segregation of information security responsibilities
• Supporting segregation with good monitoring, audit trails and management supervision

When offering cloud services, the organisation needs to have planned processes or procedures for:

• how the cloud service customer reports an information security event to the organisation
• how the organisation reports information security events to cloud service customers
• how the cloud service customer can track the status of a previously reported information security event