ISO 27001 A.8.16: monitoring for anomalies, explained for startups

A.8.16 Monitoring activities

Unusual activity raises an alert that a named person acts on. What proves it: alerts on suspicious activity routed to a named owner, and a record of one that was handled.

A certification auditor samples alert rules and a handled alert. A file that usually does the job: threat detection alerts routed to an on-call person, with one alert and its response.

How to put it in place

Each step leaves a record, and the record is what the auditor samples rather than the step itself. Inside Polara, the control card for A.8.16 walks you through it in this order.

1. Turn on threat detection in your cloud provider and alerts for unusual sign ins.
2. Route alerts to a named owner.
3. Record how each alert was handled.

The free ISO 27001 readiness assessment asks one question that evidences it:

• Do security alerts go to a named owner?

Policies, connectors and the SOC 2 overlap

In the ISO 27001 policy pack, the Logging and Monitoring Policy covers A.8.16. An auditor reads the policy for the rule, then samples the records to see the rule was followed.

Connected systems that pull evidence for it:

• Amazon Web Services, CloudWatch alarms: security-relevant monitoring alarms per region.

The same evidence counts toward SOC 2. The Trust Services criterion that cover this ground: CC7.2, anomaly monitoring.

Technological controls

A.8.16 is one of the 34 technological controls in Annex A. The controls built into your systems: access, devices, malware, vulnerabilities, backups, logging, networks, encryption and secure development. Exports and settings screenshots prove most of them.

Nearby controls in the same theme:

• A.8.13, backups
• A.8.14, redundancy
• A.8.15, logging
• A.8.17, clock synchronization
• A.8.18, powerful admin utilities
• A.8.19, installing software

Before it: A.8.15, logging. After it: A.8.17, clock synchronization. Every control, by theme, is on the Annex A controls page.