- Adopt SP 800-88 methods per media type and write them into the disposal workflow so the method is chosen once, not per event.
- Get certificates of destruction from disposal vendors that list serial numbers, not just container counts.
- Track decommissioned equipment from retirement to sanitization; the gap between the two is where devices quietly leave.
3.8.3OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWBASIC REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.8.3 — Media sanitization
3.8 Media Protection · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 · The heading label is this site's navigational shorthand; the official language is the statement below.
Official requirement statement (verbatim)
Sanitize or destroy system media containing CUI before disposal or release for reuse.
NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗Independent interpretation
What this requirement is after
Drives, tapes, phones, and copiers leaving the organization's custody are sanitized to SP 800-88 expectations or physically destroyed. Deleting files and factory resets are not sanitization, and the storeroom shelf of retired drives is a finding waiting to be written.
Mapped practices
Brilliant at the Basics practices that support this requirement
No practice maps to this requirement — deliberately.
The campaign’s twenty practices are a priority list, not a control catalog, and none of them works this requirement’s substance directly. It still applies to you if it is in your contract’s scope: address it through your own implementation and the related artifacts below, and treat the absence of a mapping here as honesty, not permission to skip it.
Doing the work
Implementation considerations and evidence
- Sanitization and destruction records with device serial numbers
- The documented method per media type
- Vendor certificates of destruction reconciled against the asset register
Artifacts
Templates and worksheets with a mapped relationship
No artifact in the library names this requirement yet. The library index groups everything by category and practice.
The other revision
Where this lands in Rev. 3
Provenance
Sources and review status
| Primary sources | NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI |
|---|---|
| Review status | Pending NIST SME review |
| Content version | 1.0 |
| Updated |