Set the Controls for NIST 800-53, Related Compliance, and Beyond
NIST SP 800-53 is a mandatory security framework for U.S. federal agencies, established under FISMA, OMB A-130, and other laws. It safeguards federal data—including classified, unclassified, PII, CUI, health, and financial information—by requiring security controls against threats. NIST 800-53 compliance is required for all federal information systems and forms the basis for federal security regulations including NIST 800-171, FIPS, FISMA, and FedRAMP. Critical infrastructure providers are encouraged to adopt NIST 800-53 controls, which can provide a foundation for NERC CIP and 10 CFR 73.54 compliance. National security systems such as SIPRnet are exempt and instead governed by CNSS.
NIST 800-53 also overlaps significantly with international and industry standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001, driving some private organizations to voluntarily adopt NIST 800-53 to facilitate wider compliance, address plans of action and milestones (POAMs), and improve security stature. For commercial entities handling federal data (e.g., contractors, cloud providers), NIST 800-171 and FedRAMP more specifically apply.
Atomic OSSEC Controls for NIST 800-53 Compliance
NIST 800-53 contains 20 security control families and about 1,000 individual controls, ranging from safeguards, countermeasures, techniques, and processes to respond to security and privacy risks. Atomicorp’s extended detection and response (XDR) solution, Atomic OSSEC, provides the rules and tools needed to address NIST 800-53 control requirements addressable by software.
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Read more about Atomic OSSEC for detection, response and compliance.
NIST 800-53 System and Information Integrity (SI)
The SI control family mandates flaw remediation, malicious code protection, security alerts, system monitoring, data integrity, and memory protection. Atomic OSSEC addresses these requirements with antivirus (AV) and antimalware capabilities (SI-3), system behavioral monitoring, defense-in-depth lateral movement protection, malware memory detection, and active response for internal and external server networks. It includes a vulnerability detector that collects a software bill of materials (SBOM) from monitored systems (SI-4) and analyzes security information and event management (SIEM) logs for vulnerabilities like MITRE CVEs for flaw remediation (SI-2) and error handling (SI-11). Its system and file integrity monitoring (FIM) captures real-time change log details (SI-7), including user activity and “who” data. Atomic OSSEC enhances SIEM data with global threat intelligence and advisories (SI-5), improving its machine learning system’s ability to detect malware and anomalous behavior.
NIST 800-53 Audit and Accountability (AU)
The AU family requires controls such as event logging, audit record content, audit record generation, audit information protection, and response to audit logging process failures. Atomic OSSEC provides rich auditing tools and process capabilities for meeting audit and accountability (AU) control requirements. These include audit logs and content (AU-2 and AU-3), audit storage (AU-4), audit review (AU-6), time stamps (AU-8), process failure alerts (AU-5), audit information analysis and correlation AU-6(9) and AU-6(3), audit information protection (AU-9), nonrepudiation of users (AU-10), and other controls.
Atomic OSSEC addresses NIST AU controls with nonrepudiation of users, event review with time stamps, process failure alerts, audit information correlation, audit integrity assurance, audit information protection, and overall AU management.
NIST 800-53 Access Control (AC)
The AC family focuses on access control policies to limit system access to authorized users, processes, or devices. The Atomic OSSEC XDR system provides agented and private cloud administrative controls and system integrity monitoring engineered according to the principles of least-privilege (NIST 800-53 AC-6) and separation of duties (NIST 800 53 AC-5). Atomic OSSEC integrates with open-source and commercial MFA and IAM solutions to further harden access at computing endpoints, and to software systems, files, accounts, and individual workflows. A dashboard GUI eases management of accounts (AC-2), access restrictions for change (AC-23), remote access protection [AC-17(1)], account monitoring and anomaly detection (AC-21), and provides alerts on unsuccessful log-in attempts (AC-7).
NIST 800-53 Security Assessment and Authorization (CA)
The CA family outlines controls for assessments, authorization, monitoring, secure information exchange, and system connections. Atomicorp facilitates security control assessment (CA-2) through risk and vulnerability reporting. Atomic OSSEC XDR continuously monitors files, systems, SIEM data, and security controls and metrics (CA-7) to prove NIST 800-53 CA compliance and facilitate ATOs (authorizations to operate).
NIST 800-53 Configuration Management (CM)
The CM family defines controls for configuration management, including baseline settings, change oversight, access restrictions, system inventories, software controls, and least functionality principles. Atomic OSSEC provides a least-privilege baseline (CM-2) and configuration change control (CM-3), as well as system configuration monitoring (CM-6) and access restriction controls and configuration hardening to meet CM-5. Access settings are configured to give system users access to the least amount of functionality and privileges (CM-7), with exceptions for additional privileges governed by defense-in-depth system controls. SBOM inventorying provides an understanding of what’s deployed to address the CM-8 system component inventory requirement.
NIST 800-53 Incident Response (IR)
IR covers incident response controls including incident handling, incident monitoring, incident reporting, and information ‘spillage’ response. The Atomic OSSEC detection and response engine integrates global threat data and machine learning to monitor and analyze code, file, and system health (IR-5), and automatically isolate the threat and alert your organization to an incident (IR-4), including in real time. Atomic OSSEC’s graphical user interface (GUI) and management dashboard makes incident monitoring and reporting for NIST 800-53 compliance easier (IR-6), providing management tools, severity lists, and graphical visualization and analysis. Atomic OSSEC also mitigates information spillage (IR-9) of sensitive information through data loss prevention (DLP), file redaction, and isolating impacted endpoints and systems.
NIST 800-53 Maintenance (MA)
The MA family prescribes controls for maintenance, maintenance tools, nonlocal maintenance, maintenance personnel, timely maintenance, and field maintenance. Atomic OSSEC facilitates system maintenance by providing tools to scan for malicious code, manage and track changes (MA-3), monitor for remote maintenance activity (MA-4), make timely updates (MA-6), and harden and back up proper configurations and compliance settings. It also scans for missing patches and issues with connecting nonlocal media (MA-2). All Atomicorp commercial offerings come with professional maintenance support.
NIST 800-53 Risk Assessment (RA)
RA lays out controls for security categorization, risk assessment, vulnerability monitoring and scanning, risk response, criticality analysis, threat hunting, and other risk assessment and mitigation measures. The vulnerability monitoring and scanning (RA-5) in Atomic OSSEC works across major operating systems such as RHEL, Ubuntu, and Windows and can also detect vulnerabilities and reduce risk on many legacy versions of Linux and Windows. Atomic OSSEC comes with a GUI to track, assess, categorize, and further respond to vulnerabilities and risks (RA-2 and RA-3), including previously undetected threats and vulnerabilities, such as fileless malware hiding in memory, for threat hunting (RA-10).
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NIST 800-53 System and Services Acquisition (SA)
SA governs security engineering principles, unsupported system components, and external system services. Atomicorp provides the visibility and control needed to secure endpoints, connections and interfaces with external service providers. Its security engineering principles start with the tenet of least-privilege access and deny by default (SA-8). Advanced malware and vulnerability detection and behavioral monitoring work across operating systems, APIs, cloud platforms, open source software building blocks (SA-17-7), and unsupported system components such as end of life (EOL) (SA-22) to protect your environment from contamination. Atomic OSSEC also provides configuration management tools and change management controls (SA-10) for secure development. It enables developers to scan and test components before incorporating them into the development environment (SA-11), and throughout development (SA- 3).
NIST 800-53 System and Communications Protection (SC)
The SC family requires controls for boundary protection, information in shared system resources, network communications, transmission and storage confidentiality, cryptographic protections, and more. Atomicorp provides boundary protection (SC-7) through its intrusion prevention and WAF capabilities, which can be used to monitor north-south and east-west network traffic, block malicious addresses, thwart denial of service (DoS) attacks (SC-5), and stop suspicious files, code injections, and privilege escalations. Its workload protection features enable microsegmentation to isolate workloads and avoid cross-contamination on shared resources.
NIST 800-53 Supply Chain Risk Management (SR)
SR requires a supply chain risk management (SCRM) plan; acquisition strategies, tools, and methods; and supply chain requirements and processes. The software supply chain has become a regular target for compromise and poses serious risk to your data, operations, and to critical infrastructure. Atomic OSSEC enables SBOM generation, which inventories software components. From there, Atomic OSSEC provides real-time file and system monitoring, including hash analysis, that you can run continuously to protect the integrity of the software and the interfaces in your ecosystem (SR-10 and SR-11), as well as built-in tamper detection and resistance (SR-9).
NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, ISO 27001 Compliance Software
Atomicorp equips federal agencies and commercial organizations with key NIST 800-53 security and privacy controls addressable by software. The controls span areas such as audit and accountability, system and information integrity, continuous monitoring, configuration management, incident response, vulnerability scanning, and supply chain risk management. This translates to easier compliance for not only NIST 800-53 but federal contractors seeking to meet NIST 800-171 requirements and non-federal enterprises using NIST as a foundation for broader compliance with ISO 27001, NERC CIP, 10 CFR 73.54, HIPAA, GDPR, and other standards.
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