NIST 800-171 Control 3.14.3: Security Alerts and Advisories

What this means

This control requires you to establish a systematic process for monitoring, receiving, and responding to security alerts and advisories relevant to your systems and environment. You must have mechanisms in place to track notifications from vendors, security researchers, and industry sources, categorize them by severity and applicability, and take documented action—whether that's patching, workarounds, or risk acceptance. The goal is to minimize the window between when a threat is disclosed and when your organization responds.

How to comply

1. 1.Establish a centralized alert monitoring capability that aggregates security advisories from multiple sources including vendor notifications, CISA alerts, and security bulletin services.
2. 2.Define and document an alert classification system that ranks advisories by severity, applicability to your systems, and potential business impact.
3. 3.Assign clear ownership and escalation paths for responding to different alert categories, with defined timeframes for acknowledgment and remediation.
4. 4.Implement automated or semi-automated processes to correlate advisories with your system inventory and identify affected assets.
5. 5.Document all received alerts and the organization's response actions, including justification for any decisions not to remediate.
6. 6.Conduct regular reviews of alert response effectiveness and adjust monitoring sources or response procedures based on gaps identified.

Evidence auditors look for

• Alert monitoring policy specifying sources, classification criteria, and response timelines
• Subscription confirmations to vendor security mailing lists, CISA AIS feeds, or third-party advisory services
• Alert log or ticket system showing received advisories, affected systems, and documented responses
• Change management records linking security advisories to applied patches or mitigations
• Escalation procedures defining roles and timeframes for addressing critical vs. informational alerts
• Quarterly alert effectiveness review meetings with documented outcomes and process improvements

Frequently asked questions

GRCWatch automates alert aggregation from your vendors and CISA, maps them to your actual systems, and routes notifications to assigned owners with documentation of your response—eliminating manual alert tracking and proving compliance automatically.

See how GRCWatch handles this control automatically

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