What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on OPS-04 Protection Against Malware - Concept?

Approved malware protection policy with version history and approval signature; Distribution evidence showing the policy reached operations and end user support staff; Inventory of system classes mapped to the protection mechanism selected for each; Management console hardening standard referenced by the policy.

What is the most common gap auditors find on OPS-04?

Policy covers office endpoints yet says nothing about production servers or container images

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Operations

`OPS-04` Protection Against Malware - Concept

Maintain approved and communicated malware protection policies stating which system specific protection mechanisms apply, how protection programs run on production components the provider is responsible for, and how they run on employee terminal equipment.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), OPS-04. 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 BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

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

Distribution evidence showing the policy reached operations and end user support staff · Endpoint management (MDM / EDR)

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Approved malware protection policy with version history and approval signature · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Inventory of system classes mapped to the protection mechanism selected for each · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Management console hardening standard referenced by the policy · 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

Policy covers office endpoints yet says nothing about production servers or container images
No stated mechanism for systems that cannot run a resident scanner
Policy approved years ago and untouched since the platform moved to containers
Management consoles treated as outside the scope of malware controls

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.

Build my evidence sheet

OPS-03 Capacity Management - Controlling of Resources · OPS-05 Protection Against Malware - Implementation