What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SIM-03 Documentation and reporting of security incidents?

Closure reports issued to customers after incident resolution; Contract extracts defining the report content and deadline owed to customers; Acknowledgement or confirmation responses received back from affected customers; Tracker showing which affected customers were sent a report and on what date.

What is the most common gap auditors find on SIM-03?

Incidents closed internally with no report reaching the affected customer

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Security Incident Management

`SIM-03` Documentation and reporting of security incidents

Once an incident has been worked through, record the resolution as the contract requires and issue that report to the customers affected so they can acknowledge it or confirm the outcome.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), SIM-03. 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

Document repository

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

Closure reports issued to customers after incident resolution · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Contract extracts defining the report content and deadline owed to customers · Vendor register / contract repository
Acknowledgement or confirmation responses received back from affected customers · HR system / LMS
Tracker showing which affected customers were sent a report and on what date · Document repository

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

Incidents closed internally with no report reaching the affected customer
Report sent only to the customer who reported it rather than all customers affected
Report content falls short of what the contract commits to deliver
No record of customer acknowledgement, so closure cannot be evidenced

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

SIM-02 Processing of security incidents · SIM-04 Duty of the users to report security incidents to a central body