OPS-23 Managing Vulnerabilities, Malfunctions and Errors - System Hardening
Harden production system components to generally accepted industry standards, document the hardening requirements for each component, verify immutable images against those requirements when the images are created, and retain configuration and log files evidencing their continuous availability.
Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), OPS-23. 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.
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
- Build pipeline output showing the compliance check applied to a golden image · Source control / CI pipeline
- Configuration drift report against the baseline for a sample of running hosts · Cloud console / configuration management
periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review
- Record of approved baseline exceptions with technical justification · Cloud console / configuration management
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
- Hardening baseline document per operating system, database and hypervisor type · Policy repository / GRC workspace
First move
Common gaps auditors find
- A public benchmark cited without stating which settings were adopted or waived
- Baseline applied at build time only while running systems drift unchecked
- No baseline defined for newer component types such as orchestration platforms
- Exceptions granted informally, leaving the effective baseline unknown
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 sheetOPS-22 Testing and Documentation of known Vulnerabilities · OPS-24 Separation of Datasets in the Cloud Infrastructure