CIS · Control 17.2 · Priority: critical · Component: Respond

What this control covers

Establish and maintain contact information for parties that need to be informed of security incidents. Contacts may include internal staff, third-party vendors, law enforcement, cyber insurance providers, relevant government agencies, Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) partners, or other stakeholders. Verify contacts annually to ensure that information is up-to-date.

Why it matters

How quickly and methodically you contain an incident determines the regulatory consequence — most fines are not for the breach itself but for the slow or absent response.

How to implement

AWS

Wire GuardDuty, Security Hub and Macie findings into your ticketing/SIEM via EventBridge. Maintain documented playbooks for IAM-key compromise, EC2 instance compromise, S3 data exposure, and run quarterly tabletop exercises.

Azure

Use Defender for Cloud + Microsoft Sentinel with playbooks (Logic Apps) for automated containment — disable user, isolate VM (NSG), revoke session tokens. Keep an on-call rotation in Teams with PagerDuty.

GitHub

Subscribe to secret-scanning alerts and Dependabot security advisories; require triage SLAs by severity. For exposed secrets, rotate at the cloud provider FIRST then revoke at GitHub — order matters.

On-premises

Roll out role-based security awareness annually + phishing simulations quarterly. Track completion in your LMS and tie to performance review for repeat-fails.

Evidence to collect

  • vendor_risk_management — See the iCompaas Evidence library for the canonical source for this evidence type.

Third-party risk management evidence (assessments, contracts, due diligence) shows supplier oversight. Focus: Establish and Maintain Contact Information for Reporting Security Incidents.

Quick checklist

  • Establish And Maintain — Date / Response
  • Ensure — Date / Response

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