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03.03.05OFFICIAL TITLEPENDING NIST SME REVIEW

03.03.05 — Audit Record Review, Analysis, and Reporting

03.03 Audit and Accountability · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3

Independent summary of the official requirement

Requires reviewing and analyzing system audit records at an organization-defined frequency for indications of inappropriate or unusual activity and its potential impact, reporting findings to organizational personnel or roles, and analyzing and correlating records across different repositories for organization-wide situational awareness.

Rev. 3 requirement text is multi-part and parameterized with organization-defined values, so this site summarizes rather than reproduces it. The summary is independent — read the official publication for the binding wording.

NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗
Independent interpretation

What this requirement is after

Logs nobody reads are a liability with storage costs. Somebody, on a defined cadence, looks at the records for unusual activity, judges what it could mean, reports what they find to a named role, and can see across sources — because real intrusions leave traces in several logs, each individually ignorable.

Across revisions

Carried from 3.3.5 with the review frequency an organization-defined parameter and with reporting and cross-repository correlation stated as explicit parts.

Mapped practices

Brilliant at the Basics practices that support this requirement

Operational supportModerate confidence

Why: Continuous OT monitoring is review-and-analysis running as a daily routine for the plant: someone is watching what the environment is doing, anomalies get investigated, and findings reach people who can act. Where OT segments sit inside the CUI boundary, that routine is the operating muscle this requirement's cadence depends on.

What this does not claim: The practice watches process behavior and network anomalies more than audit records as such, and it says nothing about the enterprise systems where most CUI audit review happens. The defined review frequency, the reporting path, and cross-repository correlation are the organization's audit program to establish — the practice keeps eyes on one estate, not the requirement implemented.

Practice-side activities
  • Baseline normal OT network behavior and alert on deviation
  • Investigate anomalies and route findings to the plant and security owners
Evidence this produces
  • Monitoring alert and investigation records for the OT estate
  • Escalation records showing findings reported to named roles

Where this holds: Holds only where OT segments fall inside the assessed CUI boundary; contributes nothing for enterprise log review.

Review status: Pending NIST SME review · Reviewed by Brilliant at the Basics editorial — practitioner-authored; NIST SME review pending · updated 2026-08-06

Doing the work

Implementation considerations and evidence

Implementation considerationsIndependent guidance — tailor to your environment
  • Right-size the cadence: a weekly thirty-minute review of identity-provider and endpoint alerts is honest and sustainable for a small shop; a claimed continuous review without the staffing behind it is neither.
  • Correlation does not require a security operations center — a platform that puts identity, endpoint, and email signals in one queue carries the cross-repository intent at small scale, and an MSP or MDR arrangement counts when the reporting path back is written down.
  • Define where findings go — a named role with authority to act, not a shared inbox nobody owns.
What operating evidence looks likeRecords worth retaining, not a submission checklist
  • Dated review records with findings and dispositions, including nothing-found reviews
  • The documented reporting path and an instance of it being used
  • Correlation capability in evidence — the console, saved queries, or service reports

Suggested owners, derived from the mapped practices and artifacts: OT engineer. Ownership is a named person in your organization, not a role on a website.

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 came from in Rev. 2

Provenance

Sources and review status

Primary sourcesNIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI
Review statusPending NIST SME review
Content version1.0
Updated