NIA Operations Summary Report

The National Information Assurance (NIA) Policy v2.0 is associated with the State of Qatar’s Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC). This policy was developed to help agencies and entities in the State of Qatar enable a full-fledged information security management system within their agency. According to the fourth policy objective, the executive team is required to demonstrate compliance with the NIA Policy v2.0 through an annual audit by a certification body. This policy includes a series of security governances and technical controls, grouped into security domains that cover control areas that an agency needs to implement as baseline security to be compliant with the NIA Policy v2.0 and in accordance with the NIA Manual. This report helps risk managers assign or delegate task to the IT operations team to correct compliance issues and clearly define the state of the organization with respect to status of NIA Policy v2.0 compliance. 

The NIA Manual is designed to be used in conjunction with the National Information Classification Policy and applicable laws and regulations within State of Qatar. The manual provides, baseline controls which an organization should implement at minimum to protect their information system. The security controls which are referenced within the Tenable audit files are grouped into the following domains: 

• Access Control Security [AM]
• Cryptographic Security [CY]
• Gateway Security [GS]
• Information Exchange [IE]
• Logging, Auditing & Security Monitoring [SM],
• Network Security [NS]
• Product Security [PR]
• Software Security [SS]
• System Usage Security [SU]
• Virtualization [VL]

Agencies conforming to the NIA policy v2.0 manual may implement over and above the baseline. In many cases NIA controls intersect with other regulations, such as Center for Internet Security (CIS) or the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.  The organization must consider compliance to NIA or other standards, but must implement the higher degree of security.

Tenable.sc provides agencies the ability to show compliance status with the NIA policy v2.0. The report starts with an executive summary which establishes the CISO with an understanding of NIA compliance and the status vulnerability using Tenable.sc. The report then establishes the status of NIA policy v2.0 compliance and vulnerability before breaking down all the security domains in more operational detail. Powered by the Tenable audit files and using the field called Cross Reference, IT managers can use this report to establish a compliance plan and understand possible problem areas in any specific security domain within the NIA policy.

Using the detailed NIA control summary, a risk manager is able to understand exactly where to focus efforts and delegate tasks to different teams for remediation efforts. Although the main goal is to satisfy the NIA policy, this report will also allow a risk manager to view the state of vulnerability management. Using this report, a risk manager will be able to effectively brief a CISO on NIA compliance and prepare for an audit from a certification body.  

The report is available in the Tenable.sc Feed, a comprehensive collection of dashboards, reports, assurance report cards and assets. The report can be easily located in the Tenable.sc Feed under the category Compliance & Configuration Assessment.

The report requirements are:

• Tenable.sc 5.14.1
• Nessus 8.10.1
• Compliance data

Tenable.sc Continuous View (CV) is the market-defining On-Prem Cyber Exposure Platform. Tenable.sc CV provide the ability to continuously Assess an organization’s adherence to best practice configuration baselines. Tenable.sc provides customers with a full and complete Cyber Exposure platform for completing an effective Information Security Management System program prescribed by the NIA standard.

This report contains:

Executive Summary: The Executive Summary provides the operations team a quick view into NIA Compliance and Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) summary matrices. Using a series of tables and matrices this chapter provides an easy-to-understand view of the current state of the NIA compliance.

NIA Compliance Summary: The NIA Policy v2.0 Compliance Summary chapter sets up the operations team to establish an understanding on NIA compliance and track mitigation efforts. By displaying a trend analysis for all NIA compliance checks, risk managers are able to track the proficiency of the operations team.

Vulnerability Summary: The Vulnerability Summary chapter allows the operations team to understand how patching efforts are going and provide a quick glance at the organization’s state of vulnerability management. This chapter enables the risk manager to focus on problem areas and effectively plan mitigations activities. The operations team use this chapter to better prioritize mitigation tasks using Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) over Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).

NIA Policy v2.0 Technical Controls Detailed Summary: The NIA Policy v2.0 Technical Controls Detailed Summary provides the operations team with a detailed summary of each NIA security domain. The level of detail allows a risk manager to focus in on problematic areas of compliance and plan patching efforts effectively. The security domains that make up the sections of this chapter include all the available technical controls that are referenced within the Tenable policy compliance scans using audit files.