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KSI-CNA-RVPReviewing Protections

LOW
MODERATE

Formerly KSI-CNA-05

>Control Description

Persistently review the effectiveness of protection against denial of service attacks and other unwanted activity.
Defined terms:
Persistently

>NIST 800-53 Controls

>Trust Center Components
3

Ways to express your implementation of this indicator — approaches vary by organization size, complexity, and data sensitivity.

From the field: Mature implementations express patch management through compliance dashboards — SLA adherence by severity level, overdue patch counts, and deployment success rates as live metrics. Automated patching pipelines handle routine updates, with policy engines enforcing patch windows and pre-deployment testing requirements.

Patch Compliance Dashboard

Dashboards

Dashboard expressing patch posture — compliance percentages by severity, overdue patches, and remediation velocity as live indicators

Automated: Vulnerability management APIs verify patch deployment status and SLA compliance

Patch Testing Procedures

Processes & Procedures

How patches are tested and validated before production deployment — including automated testing in staging environments

Patch Management Policy

Policies

Human-readable patch management policy with SLAs for critical, high, and routine patches — documents intent behind automated patching

>Programmatic Queries

Beta
Security

CLI Commands

List web ACLs
aws wafv2 list-web-acls --scope REGIONAL --query "WebACLs[].{Name:Name,Id:Id}" --output table
Get WAF rule details
aws wafv2 get-web-acl --name <name> --scope REGIONAL --id <id> --query "WebACL.Rules[].{Name:Name,Priority:Priority,Action:Action}" --output table

>20x Assessment Focus Areas

Aligned with FedRAMP 20x Phase Two assessment methodology

Completeness & Coverage:

  • Does your DoS and unwanted activity protection cover all entry points — public APIs, web applications, DNS, email, and internal service-to-service traffic?
  • Are protections in place for all layers — volumetric (L3/L4), protocol (L4), and application-layer (L7) attacks?
  • How do you ensure third-party or inherited services (CDN, DNS provider, IaaS) also have adequate DoS protections, and are their SLAs documented?
  • Are there any services or endpoints where DoS protection is limited or absent, and how are those risks documented?

Automation & Validation:

  • What automated mechanisms detect and mitigate DoS attacks in real time, and what is the maximum time from attack start to mitigation activation?
  • How do you test DoS protection effectiveness — do you run controlled load tests or DDoS simulations against production or staging?
  • What happens if your DDoS mitigation provider itself experiences an outage — what failover protection applies?
  • How do you automatically distinguish between legitimate traffic spikes (product launch, press coverage) and attack traffic to avoid blocking real users?

Inventory & Integration:

  • What DDoS mitigation services and tools are in your stack (cloud provider native, third-party CDN, WAF), and how do they coordinate during an attack?
  • How do DoS detection alerts integrate with your SIEM and incident response workflow?
  • Are rate-limiting and traffic-shaping configurations defined as code and applied consistently across all services?
  • How do you coordinate DDoS response with your cloud provider's support and mitigation teams?

Continuous Evidence & Schedules:

  • How frequently do you review and test DoS protection effectiveness, and what evidence proves each review was completed?
  • Is DoS mitigation telemetry (blocked traffic volume, attack types, mitigation response times) available via API or dashboard?
  • What evidence shows protections have been improved based on past attacks or effectiveness reviews?
  • How do you demonstrate that DoS protections remain effective as your traffic patterns and architecture evolve?

Update History

2026-02-04Removed italics and changed the ID as part of new standardization in v0.9.0-beta; no material changes.

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