NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 AT-2(3) — Social Engineering And Mining

What this control requires

Trains users to identify and report social engineering and mining attempts, like phishing, using organizational channels to mitigate risks. This control supports the Social Engineering Training Module capability within the Awareness and Training family.

In plain English

Trains users to identify and report social engineering and mining attempts, like phishing, using organizational channels to mitigate risks. In practice, this means you can prove you security mitigate risks-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(3)) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Secure Development

Pipeline. Require code review, SAST (Semgrep / Snyk Code), SCA (Dependabot / Renovate), secret-scanning and IaC scanning in the merge pipeline.

Branch protection. Protected branches enforce reviews, signed commits and passing CI before merge; document the protection rules as the control evidence.

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

• Security. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Review. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Social. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Control. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Testing,. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: mitigate risks, review, capability, security, code, secure, channels, development.

Evidence to collect

• Code Repo Scan. Source-control evidence — branch protection, required reviewers, CI status, SCA / SAST reports.

Source control pipelines (GitHub, GitLab) enforce SDLC guardrails. Focus: Social Engineering And Mining.

Common pitfalls

• CI security checks set to warn-only; the merge button is faster than the security feedback.

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 3.14.2 — Malicious Code Protection
• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) CC1.4 — Competence and Training
• CIS Controls v8 16.12 — Implement Code-Level Security Checks
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.8.28 — Secure coding

Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

• Control CP-3(1) — Simulated Events
• Control AT-2(4) — Suspicious Communications And Anomalous System Behavior
• Control IA-12(5) — Address Confirmation
• Control PL-5 — Privacy Impact Assessment
• Control MA-3 — Maintenance Tools
• Control CA-7 — Continuous Monitoring

References

• NIST Computer Security Resource Center — NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5
• Catalogue identifier: Control AT-2(3)

Topics: awareness trainingsecure developmentcode review testingdevsecopssecurity training