CIS Controls v8 17.7 — Conduct Routine Incident Response Exercises

What this control requires

Plan and conduct routine incident response exercises and scenarios for key personnel involved in the incident response process to prepare for responding to real-world incidents. Exercises need to test communication channels, decision making, and workflows. Conduct testing on an annual basis, at a minimum.

In plain English

Plan and conduct routine incident response exercises and scenarios for key personnel involved in the incident response process to prepare for responding to real-world incidents. In practice, this means you can prove you test response-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

The CIS Controls are an industry-vetted, prioritised defence: skipping a safeguard widens the attack surface that the safeguards above and below it assume is closed. Audit frameworks (FedRAMP, PCI DSS, HIPAA) all cite CIS as evidence of due care.

This control is rated high. Auditors expect a named owner, a remediation SLA, and a tooling artefact that evidences continuous operation.

What an auditor looks for

A CIS-aligned reviewer wants to see (a) which Implementation Group you are targeting, (b) a documented owner for the safeguard, and (c) a tooling or process artefact (config, scan output, ticket) that proves the safeguard runs on the cadence the control demands.

Within Recover, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control 17.7) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Incident Response

Runbook. Maintain a runbook keyed by incident type with named roles (IC, comms, scribe), an out-of-band comms channel, and a 72-hour timeline for external notification.

Tabletop. Run a quarterly tabletop exercise (ransomware, insider, supply-chain) and feed gaps back into the runbook.

Code Review Testing

Pipeline. Require at least one human reviewer plus passing CI (lint, type, unit, security scan) before merge — protected branches enforce this.

Operational checklist

• Test. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Conduct. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: response, incident response process, routine incident response exercises.

Evidence to collect

• Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence
• Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Signed policy or standard documents the safeguard. Focus: Conduct Routine Incident Response Exercises.

Common pitfalls

• Runbooks that name a role but no person, or list a paging channel that no longer exists.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

• NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 IR-3 — Incident Response Testing
• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) CC7.4 — Incident Response
• NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 3.3.6 — Audit Record Reduction and Report Generation

Related controls in CIS Controls v8

• Control 17.4 — Establish and Maintain an Incident Response Process
• Control 17.8 — Conduct Post-Incident Reviews
• Control 11.5 — Test Data Recovery
• Control 11.2 — Perform Automated Backups
• Control 17.9 — Establish and Maintain Security Incident Thresholds
• Control 5.3 — Disable Dormant Accounts

References

• Center for Internet Security — CIS Controls v8
• Catalogue identifier: Control 17.7

Topics: governance riskincident responsechange managementcode review testingkey management