CMMC Practice AU.L2-3.3.2 – User Accountability: Ensure that the actions of individual system users can be uniquely traced to those users so they can be held accountable for their actions.
Links to Publicly Available Resources
This webinar covers uses cases that support automating the detection of dangerous user behavior. This document provides assessment guidance for conducting Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) assessments for Level 2. Gartner defines insider risk management (IRM) as the tools and capabilities to measure, detect and contain undesirable behavior of trusted accounts within the organization. In response to a recognized need to minimize the effects of unwanted activity within the organization and key partners, security and risk management leaders have to mitigate risk. This market consists of tools and solutions to monitor the behavior of employees, service partners and key suppliers working inside the organization, and to evaluate whether behavior falls within expectations of role and corporate risk tolerance. Insider risk may involve errors, fraud, theft of confidential or commercially valuable information, or the sabotage of computer systems. This article discusses how User Activity Monitoring (UAM) can be used to thwart insider threats. The article discusses legal and ethical aspects of user activity monitoring and best practices. The Dataverse auditing feature is designed to meet the external and internal auditing, compliance, security, and governance policies that are common to many enterprises. Dataverse auditing logs changes that are made to customer records in an environment with a Dataverse database. Dataverse auditing also logs user access through an app or through the SDK in an environment. This blog discusses the biggest IT security threat facing companies today, their authorized users.
Discussion [NIST SP 800-171 R2]
This requirement ensures that the contents of the audit record include the information needed to link the audit event to the actions of an individual to the extent feasible. Organizations consider logging for traceability including results from monitoring of account usage, remote access, wireless connectivity, mobile device connection, communications at system boundaries, configuration settings, physical access, nonlocal maintenance, use of maintenance tools, temperature and humidity, equipment delivery and removal, system component inventory, use of mobile code, and use of VoIP.
Further Discussion
Capturing the necessary information in audit logs ensures that you can trace actions to a specific user. This may include capturing user IDs, source and destination addresses, and time stamps. Logging from networks, servers, clients, and applications should be considered in ensuring accountability.
This practice, AU.L2-3.3.2, which ensures logging and traceability of user actions, supports the control of non-privileged users required by AC.L2-3.1.7 as well as many other auditing, configuration management, incident response, and situation awareness practices.