By Lon J. Berman, CISSP, RDRP By federal law, an information system will be designated as a National Security System (NSS) in accordance with the following definition: The term “national security system” means any information system (including any telecommunications system) used or operated by an agency or by a contractor of an agency, or other…
This article was written by Kathryn M. Daily, CISSP, RDRP of BAI Information Security. In a previous article, security control inheritance from an external system hosted at a departmental or agency data center was discussed. In this article, we are going to discuss inheritance from a FedRAMP Approved Cloud Service Provider (CSP) such as Amazon…
This article was written by Lon Berman, CISSP, RDRP of BAI Information Security Step 6 of the Risk Management Framework (RMF) is entitled “Monitor Security Controls”. Many security professionals would argue it is the most important step, since monitoring is what transforms RMF from yet another “point in time” evaluation to a true life cycle…
Article Written By P. Devon Schall, CISSP, of BAI Information Security. I recently attended the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) Workshop on May 16-17 at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The workshop proved to be informative in relation to how government and industry are implementing the guidance issued by President Obama in Executive Order 13636 outlining the responsibilities…
By Lon Berman, CISSP of BAI Information Security As you probably know, the “catalog” of security controls used in RMF is derived from NIST Special Publication (SP) 800- 53 Rev 4. What you may not know is that NIST is hard at work on SP 800-53 Rev 5. The reaction to this news on the…
By Lon J. Berman, CISSP of BAI Information Security The Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service, or eMASS, is a web-based Government off-the-shelf (GOTS) solution that automates a broad range of services for comprehensive, fully integrated cybersecurity management, including controls scorecard measurement, dashboard reporting, and the generation of Risk Management Framework (RMF) package reports. If you’re…
By Kathryn M. Daily, CISSP BAI Information Security In this issue we will shine the spotlight on the Awareness and Training (AT) family of security controls. We’ll show you how the controls dictate the types and frequencies of training that organizations must provide. You’ll also learn about the extent to which existing DoD publications provide…
By Lon J. Berman, CISSP BAI Information Security Supporting documentation (aka. artifacts) is key to providing evidence of compliance with security controls. Previously in this Newsletter we have spent some time describing the three fundamental classes of RMF documentation, to wit: Policy. Policy documents describe what the organization does to provide for confidentiality, integrity and…
By Lon Berman, CISSP of BAI Information Security Like any complex process, RMF is not without its share of potential pitfalls. Now that we have the benefit of some more RMF projects under our belt, we thought it was time for a “revisited edition” of the RMF Top Ten Pitfalls. 10. Assuming system boundaries have…
By Lon Berman, CISSP of BAI Information Security If you ask most system owners about the desired outcome of their RMF efforts, they will readily tell you “we are expecting the Authorizing Official (AO) to sign an Authorization to Operate (ATO) for our system.” But how much do they really know about what goes into…