What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.5.6 Contact with special interest groups?

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.5.6, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats; A list of memberships in special interest groups, sector information sharing bodies, security forums and professional associations, with the named participant for each; Records of alerts, advisories and patch notices received through these groups and how they were acted on; Evidence of information exchanged, such as shared indicators or presentations, within the group's sharing rules; Identified liaison contacts within these groups for use during incidents.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.5.6?

Memberships exist but advisories go to a personal mailbox and are never triaged

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Organizational controls

`A.5.6` Contact with special interest groups

The organization is to join and stay in touch with special interest groups, specialist security communities and professional bodies. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): keeps an appropriate flow of information security knowledge between the organization and specialist communities. As an Annex A reference control, it is compared with the controls determined in risk treatment (6.1.3 c) and recorded in the Statement of Applicability as included or excluded, with the justification and implementation status (6.1.3 d); implementation guidance is ISO/IEC 27002:2022 5.6.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.5.6. 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 ISO/IEC 27001:2022 in the compliance library.

Clauses 4 to 10 are the management-system requirements: none of them can be excluded when an organisation claims conformity. The 93 Annex A controls are a reference set: one may be excluded with a justification in the Statement of Applicability. Certification bodies assess conformity; the evidence lists here are what auditors commonly ask for, not a list the standard prescribes.

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

Records of alerts, advisories and patch notices received through these groups and how they were acted on · Vulnerability scanner / patch tooling

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Evidence of information exchanged, such as shared indicators or presentations, within the group's sharing rules · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.5.6, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
A list of memberships in special interest groups, sector information sharing bodies, security forums and professional associations, with the named participant for each · Document repository
Identified liaison contacts within these groups for use during incidents · Document repository

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Vulnerability scanner / patch tooling on a schedule; put the documents under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Memberships exist but advisories go to a personal mailbox and are never triaged
No one is designated to participate, so membership lapses unnoticed
Information received is not fed into vulnerability or threat processes
Sharing rules of the group are not respected, creating confidentiality exposure

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

A.5.5 Contact with authorities · A.5.7 Threat intelligence