Audit findings are no fun, but leaving them unremediated is even worse. A solid risk-based remediation plan is key to cleaning up those audit woes in a sane and orderly fashion. This CCM control is all about establishing that plan, communicating it, and actually following through to squash those findings.
Where did this come from?
This control comes from the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix v4.0.10 - 2023-09-26. You can download the full matrix from https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/artifacts/cloud-controls-matrix-v4 to learn more. The matrix provides a handy structure for assessing cloud security posture. For more on AWS audit finding remediation, check out the AWS Security Hub Findings documentation.
Who should care?
- Cloud security engineers tasked with addressing audit findings
- Compliance managers responsible for audit readiness and responses
- IT leadership needing visibility into security posture and remediation progress
What is the risk?
Failing to promptly and properly address audit findings leaves security gaps lingering. This increases the likelihood of a breach or compliance violation occurring by giving vulnerabilities and misconfigurations more time to be discovered and exploited by attackers. Lack of a consistent remediation plan also makes it difficult to prioritize fixes, track progress, and report status.
What's the care factor?
Remediation is a crucial part of the audit lifecycle. Without timely fixes, audits become all pain and no gain. While lower risk findings can often wait, critical issues demand urgent attention to avoid incidents. A solid remediation program allows you to knock out the important stuff first. Neglecting remediation entirely will quickly undermine any other security efforts.
When is it relevant?
A remediation plan should kick in as soon as audit results are available. It's most helpful when findings are risk-ranked for prioritization. Extremely time-sensitive audits, like those related to active incidents, may shortcut the full plan. Remediation is less relevant for vague, low-risk findings that don't map to specific actions.
What are the tradeoffs?
Investigating and fixing audit findings takes time and effort that could go to other security tasks. Chasing down every last low-severity issue may distract from more strategic work. Automated remediation is ideal but not always feasible. User experience can suffer if fixes are rushed out. But incidents are even more disruptive, so prompt patching is worth some UX risk.
How to make it happen?
- Review audit results and map each finding to a specific remediation task.
- Assign a risk level to each task based on exploit likelihood and business impact.
- For high risks, consider setting up real-time monitoring to identify exploits quickly.
- Designate an owner for each task and set reasonable milestones and due dates.
- Capture remediation deliverables like code changes, config updates, etc.
- Regularly report on remediation progress metrics to stakeholders.
- Follow change management best practices for deploying fixes to production.
- Feed remediation insights back into audit planning for continuous improvement.
What are some gotchas?
Some remediation may require deploying major code changes or architecture updates. Be sure to allow adequate design, dev, test and release time. Fixes requiring cloud configuration changes will need appropriate permissions like ec2:ModifyInstanceAttribute or s3:PutBucketAcl. Validate effective permissions before planning deployments: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_policies_testing-policies.html
What are the alternatives?
Automated tools like AWS Security Hub can streamline finding collection and risk ranking. Jira or other ticketing systems are helpful for tracking the lifecycle of remediation tasks if you're not using a dedicated GRC platform. For log findings, a full-featured SIEM can automatically identify anomalies. Real-time vulnerability scanners also supplement point-in-time audit results.
Explore further
- CIS Control 16 speaks to vulnerability monitoring and remediation cadence
- Risk registers and exception processes are important complements to remediation
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