12.10.1 Incident response plan ready for activation
An incident response plan must exist and be ready to activate if a security incident is suspected or confirmed. At minimum it covers: roles and duties, plus approaches for communication and for contacting parties, including at least notifying payment brands and acquirers; response procedures giving specific containment and mitigation steps per incident type; procedures for business recovery and continuity; processes for backing up data; an analysis of the legal duties to report compromises; coverage of, and responses covering, every critical system component; and reference to, or inclusion of, the payment brands' incident response procedures. Objective under the customized approach: a thorough incident response plan meeting card brand expectations is kept.
Source: PCI DSS v4.0.1, 12.10.1. 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 PCI DSS v4.0.1 in the compliance library.
Version 4.0.1 is the active version; 4.0 has been retired. Appendix A1 applies only to multi-tenant service providers, A2 only to card-present POS POI terminals that still use SSL or early TLS, and A3 only when a payment brand or acquirer requires it. Which requirements apply to you follows your validation type.
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
- Legal reporting requirements analysis · Document repository
- Records of prior incidents showing plan use · Policy repository / GRC workspace
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
- Incident response plan with role and contact tables · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Payment brand and acquirer notification procedures · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Incident-type playbooks with containment and mitigation steps · Document repository
First move
Common gaps auditors find
- Plan lacks payment brand and acquirer notification steps
- Contact details out of date
- Past incidents handled outside the documented 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 sheet12.9.2 TPSP support for customer information requests · 12.10.2 Annual review and testing of the incident response plan