What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on 5.27 Learning from information security incidents?

A procedure for quantifying and monitoring incident types, volumes and costs, with the resulting metrics or dashboards; Post-incident review reports identifying causes and recommended improvements; Changes to the risk assessment and to the risk treatment plan, each traced back to the incident that prompted it; Records of new or strengthened controls implemented after recurring or serious incidents; Revisions to the incident management plan and scenarios informed by incidents; Awareness and training material that uses real incident examples.

What is the most common gap auditors find on 5.27?

Incident costs are never captured, so trends and business impact are unknown

ISO/IEC 27002:2022 · Organizational controls

`5.27` Learning from information security incidents

What the organization learns from its information security incidents is to be fed back to strengthen and improve its security controls. Purpose: make future incidents less likely or less damaging. Guidance: set up procedures to measure and track the kinds, numbers and costs of incidents. Use what incident evaluation reveals to improve the incident management plan with its scenarios and procedures (5.24); to spot incidents that recur or are serious, and their causes, so the risk assessment is updated and additional controls are chosen and implemented to cut the likelihood or impact of similar events, supported by gathering and tracking data on incident types, volumes and costs; and to enrich user awareness and training (6.3) using real cases that show the possible harm, the right reaction and ways to stop a recurrence. ISO/IEC 27035 carries more on this.

Source: ISO/IEC 27002:2022, 5.27. 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 27002:2022 in the compliance library.

ISO/IEC 27002 is guidance on the Annex A controls; certification is against ISO/IEC 27001. Use this set when your sheet follows the 27002 numbering.

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

Post-incident review reports identifying causes and recommended improvements · Document repository
Records of new or strengthened controls implemented after recurring or serious incidents · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

A procedure for quantifying and monitoring incident types, volumes and costs, with the resulting metrics or dashboards · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Changes to the risk assessment and to the risk treatment plan, each traced back to the incident that prompted it · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Revisions to the incident management plan and scenarios informed by incidents · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Awareness and training material that uses real incident examples · HR system / LMS

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

Incident costs are never captured, so trends and business impact are unknown
Lessons are written up but the resulting actions are not tracked to completion
The risk assessment is not revisited after significant incidents
Recurring incident types are handled individually without any cause analysis

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

5.26 Response to information security incidents · 5.28 Collection of evidence