NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 AT-2(1) — Practical Exercises

What this control requires

Includes practical exercises in literacy training to simulate events like social engineering, enhancing user ability to respond to security and privacy incidents. This control supports the Simulation Training Platform capability within the Awareness and Training family.

In plain English

Includes practical exercises in literacy training to simulate events like social engineering, enhancing user ability to respond to security and privacy incidents. In practice, this means you can prove you security management-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

SP 800-53 is the catalogue every U.S. federal authorisation (FedRAMP, FISMA, CMMC) and most regulated industries point at. A missing control surfaces as a Plan of Action & Milestones (POA&M) item that an Authorizing Official must approve before the Authority To Operate is granted or renewed.

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 3PAO (FedRAMP) or Independent Assessor (NIST RMF) tests against NIST SP 800-53A assessment procedures. For each control they expect a documented implementation that addresses every assessment objective (Examine, Interview, Test) and an implementation summary in the System Security Plan.

Within Awareness and Training, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control AT-2(1)) 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.

Operational checklist

• Security. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Literacy. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Practical. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Social. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Response. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: management, privacy, incidents, exercises, events, capability, response, security.

Evidence to collect

• Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Practical 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 800-171 Rev. 3 3.2.1 — Literacy Training and Awareness
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.5.27 — Learning from information security incidents
• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) P6.6 — Breach and Incident Notification to Stakeholders
• BSI C5:2020 SIM-03 — Documentation and reporting of security incidents
• CIS Controls v8 17.9 — Establish and Maintain Security Incident Thresholds

Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

• Control AT-2 — Literacy Training And Awareness
• Control IR-2 — Incident Response Training
• Control IR-2(1) — Simulated Events
• Control IR-9(2) — Training
• Control IR-2(2) — Automated Training Environments
• Control CP-3 — Contingency Training

References

• NIST Computer Security Resource Center — NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5
• Catalogue identifier: Control AT-2(1)

Topics: incident responseawareness trainingchange managementprivacy managementsecurity training