Cyber attacks are a reality. Sometimes even with the best protective measures in place, adversaries can breach perimeter defenses and find their way into systems.

Draft NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-160, Volume 2, Revision 1, Developing Cyber-Resilient Systems: A Systems Security Engineering Approach, turns the traditional perimeter defense strategy on its head and moves organizations toward a cyber resiliency strategy that facilitates defending systems from the inside out instead of from the outside in. This guidance helps organizations anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, or compromises on systems – including hostile and increasingly destructive cyber attacks from nation states, criminal gangs, and disgruntled individuals.

This major update to NIST’s flagship cyber resiliency publication offers significant new content and support tools for organizations to defend against cyber attacks, including ever-growing and destructive ransomware attacks. The document provides suggestions on how to limit the damage that adversaries can inflict by impeding their lateral movement, increasing their work factor, and reducing their time on target.

In particular, the draft publication:

• Updates the controls that support cyber resiliency to be consistent with NIST SP 800-53, Revision 5
• Standardizes a single threat taxonomy (i.e., Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge [ATT&CK] framework)
• Provides a detailed mapping and analysis of cyber resiliency implementation approaches and supporting NIST SP 800-53 controls to the ATT&CK framework techniques, mitigations, and candidate mitigations

The public comment period is open through September 20, 2021. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page v of this draft.  For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy--Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.