ISO/IEC 27001:2022·Annex A A.8.7·medium·Component: Technological controls

What this control requires

Protection against malware shall be implemented and supported by appropriate user awareness.
— ISO/IEC 27001:2022, Annex A A.8.7

In plain English

Protection against malware shall be implemented and supported by appropriate user awareness. In practice, this means you can prove you threat intelligence-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

ISO 27001 certification depends on showing each Annex A control is either implemented or explicitly justified for exclusion in the Statement of Applicability (SoA). Certification bodies sample controls during surveillance audits, and a missing SoA entry — or implementation that doesn't match the SoA wording — is a finding.

What an auditor looks for

An ISO 27001 lead auditor looks for: (1) an SoA entry covering the control with justification, (2) a documented procedure or policy implementing it, (3) records that prove the procedure runs (logs, tickets, training records) and (4) management-review evidence that effectiveness is monitored.

Within Technological controls, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Annex A A.8.7) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Endpoint Protection

MDM. Make MDM enrollment a hard gate for device access (Intune compliance + Conditional Access, or Jamf + Okta device trust). Unmanaged devices simply don't get a session token.

EDR. Deploy CrowdStrike / SentinelOne / Defender for Endpoint to every server and laptop; alert on any host that stops sending telemetry for >24h.

Operational checklist

  • Threat. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Protection. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Scope: intelligence, against malware.

Evidence to collect

  • Edr Scan. edr_scan evidence
  • Infra Scan. Continuous infrastructure-posture telemetry — AWS Config, Azure Policy compliance, GCP Organisation Policy, Wiz / Prisma findings.

EDR telemetry (CrowdStrike, Defender for Endpoint) confirms malware controls are deployed.

Common pitfalls

  • Pilot MDM rollouts that quietly exclude executives or engineers; carving out the highest-risk users is the most common audit failure.

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.

References

Topics: awareness trainingedr xdrendpoint protectionthreat intelligence