What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SEF-03 Incident Response Plans?

Approved incident response plan with version, owner and approval date; Communication and notification section with templates and contact lists for internal teams, customers and key suppliers; Stakeholder mapping showing which customers and suppliers are notified for which incident types; Records from a past incident or exercise showing notifications were sent as the plan describes; Plan distribution list and acknowledgement records.

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

Plan names technical responders but has no route for telling affected customers

CSA CCM v4.1 · SEF - Security Incident Management, E-Discovery, & Cloud Forensics

`SEF-03` Incident Response Plans

The organisation maintains an approved, communicated and exercised security incident response plan. At a minimum the plan sets out how the organisation will inform the internal teams involved, any service customers who are affected, and other business-critical parties such as supply-chain partners who could be hit.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, SEF-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 CSA CCM v4.1 in the compliance library.

Version 4.1 adds 11 controls (among them API security, log sanitisation and a service bill of materials) and renumbers several domains. CSA accepts v4.0.x during its transition; if your STAR assessment is still on v4.0.1, check the numbering against it.

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 from a past incident or exercise showing notifications were sent as the plan describes · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Plan distribution list and acknowledgement records · HR system / LMS

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Approved incident response plan with version, owner and approval date · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Communication and notification section with templates and contact lists for internal teams, customers and key suppliers · Vendor register / contract repository
Stakeholder mapping showing which customers and suppliers are notified for which incident types · Vendor register / contract 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

Plan names technical responders but has no route for telling affected customers
Supplier and partner contacts missing or out of date
Communication templates exist only in an inbox and are not part of the approved plan

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

SEF-02 Service Management Policy and Procedures · SEF-04 Incident Response Testing