What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SEC10-BP04 Develop and test security incident response playbooks?

Playbook set covering anticipated scenarios such as denial of service, ransomware and credential compromise; Playbooks for known finding and alert types; Records of playbook tests or exercises with dates and participants; Playbook revision history after incidents or tests.

What is the most common gap auditors find on SEC10-BP04?

a single generic plan with no scenario-specific steps

AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar · Incident Response

`SEC10-BP04` Develop and test security incident response playbooks

Develop incident response playbooks giving prescriptive steps for anticipated incident scenarios, and test them so responders follow a known structure rather than improvising.

Source: AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar, SEC10-BP04. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar in the compliance library.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Records of playbook tests or exercises with dates and participants · Document repository
Playbook revision history after incidents or tests · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Playbook set covering anticipated scenarios such as denial of service, ransomware and credential compromise · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Playbooks for known finding and alert types · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

a single generic plan with no scenario-specific steps
playbooks written once and never exercised
no playbook for the alert types the detection tooling actually raises

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

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SEC10-BP03 Prepare forensic capabilities · SEC10-BP05 Pre-provision access