NIST 800-172 Enhanced Security Requirements

Our enhanced assessment goes beyond standard NIST 800-171 evaluations to examine your environment against the advanced requirements of 800-172. We evaluate your architecture's resistance to APT techniques, assess zero trust maturity, test incident response capabilities against sophisticated attack scenarios, and identify gaps in threat detection and cyber resiliency.

Advanced Testing: Purple team exercises that simulate APT tactics, techniques, and procedures specific to your industry. We test lateral movement resistance, privilege escalation paths, data exfiltration channels, and persistence mechanisms that standard vulnerability assessments miss entirely.

Deliverables: Enhanced security posture report, APT resilience scorecard, zero trust maturity assessment, detailed remediation roadmap with effort estimates, and executive briefing on threat landscape specific to your program areas.

NIST 800-172 fundamentally requires zero trust principles throughout the CUI environment. We design and implement comprehensive zero trust architectures that verify every access request, enforce least-privilege dynamically, and continuously monitor for anomalous behavior regardless of network location.

Architecture Components: Software-defined perimeters replacing traditional VPN access, micro-segmentation isolating workloads and applications, continuous authentication and authorization for every resource request, device health verification before access grants, encrypted communications between all components, and policy engines that make real-time access decisions based on risk signals.

Identity-Centric Security: Advanced identity governance with risk-based authentication, behavioral analytics that detect compromised credentials, privileged access management with session recording, and just-in-time privilege elevation that limits standing administrative access.

Enhanced requirements demand architectures that resist penetration and limit damage when breaches occur. We engineer environments where an attacker gaining initial access cannot easily move laterally, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate data without triggering detection and response mechanisms.

Dual Authorization: Implementation of dual authorization for critical operations, ensuring no single compromised account can execute high-impact actions on CUI systems. This includes split-knowledge procedures for cryptographic key management and multi-person approval for system configuration changes.

Network Diversity: Architectures employing technology diversity that prevents single-exploit compromise of entire environments. Different operating systems, network equipment vendors, and security tools create defense-in-depth that forces adversaries to develop multiple independent attack chains.

Standard security monitoring is insufficient against APTs that use living-off-the-land techniques, fileless malware, and legitimate tools to blend with normal operations. Our advanced threat detection deploys behavioral analytics, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and proactive threat hunting that identifies adversary activity conventional tools miss.

Threat Hunting Operations: Scheduled and hypothesis-driven threat hunts targeting MITRE ATT&CK techniques relevant to your threat profile. Our analysts search for indicators of compromise, anomalous authentication patterns, suspicious data movement, and persistence mechanisms across your environment.

Intelligence Integration: Direct feeds from government and commercial threat intelligence sources, correlated with your environment's telemetry to provide context-aware alerting that prioritizes genuine threats over noise.

NIST 800-172 requires organizations to operate through attacks rather than simply attempting to prevent them. We engineer cyber resiliency into your systems so that mission-critical operations continue even when adversaries achieve partial compromise.

Resiliency Techniques: Redundant systems with automated failover, data replication across geographically separated sites, system reconstitution capabilities from known-good baselines, and operational procedures that maintain mission function during incident response. We implement deception technologies that misdirect adversaries and consume their resources while protecting real assets.

Recovery Engineering: Rapid system reconstitution from immutable backups, automated re-imaging of compromised endpoints, gold image management with integrity verification, and tabletop exercises that validate recovery procedures against realistic APT scenarios.

CMMC Level 3 will require enhanced security requirements derived from NIST 800-172 for organizations handling CUI on critical programs. Government-led assessments at this level demand demonstrable implementation of advanced controls that go well beyond Level 2's requirements.

Assessment Readiness: We prepare your organization for government-led CMMC Level 3 assessments by implementing required enhanced controls, developing evidence packages that demonstrate implementation effectiveness, and conducting mock assessments using the anticipated evaluation methodology.

Continuous Compliance: Level 3 compliance demands ongoing advanced security operations. We establish the monitoring, threat hunting, and incident response capabilities needed to maintain compliance between assessments while providing genuine protection against the threat actors these requirements are designed to address.