DE.AE-06 says information on adverse events is provided to authorized staff and tools. A detection that never reaches the person who can act on it has no value. This outcome is about routing: alerts, findings, and tickets go to the right place, quickly, and only to people who should see them.
CSF is voluntary guidance. There is no CSF certification.
What good looks like
Security tools send alerts to responders and to incident response tools. Authorized responders can open log analysis findings at any time. Certain alert types automatically create and assign tickets, and people can create tickets by hand when they spot something themselves.
How to implement it
- Decide who needs to know about which events: on call engineers, security owner, IT, legal, and leadership for serious cases.
- Connect your detection tools to a paging or chat channel and to your ticketing system.
- Define which alert types auto create tickets and who they are assigned to.
- Restrict access to sensitive findings by role, and log who views them.
- Give responders a way to reach findings outside business hours.
- Test the path quarterly by firing a harmless test alert and timing how long it takes to reach a human.
A worked example
A cloud security alert flags a storage bucket made public. The alert goes to a chat channel nobody watches at night. By morning, the data has been exposed for nine hours. The corrected design sends high severity alerts to an on call phone, creates a ticket automatically, and assigns it to the infrastructure owner. The ticket notes the alert source and links to the finding. The owner closes the bucket in ten minutes and records the fix.
Design the routing on one page
Draw a table with alert types in rows and in columns: who is notified, how, how fast, and what ticket is created. Cover identity, endpoint, cloud, application, and vulnerability alerts. Include a fallback person for each. Keep it short enough that everyone on the rota can remember it.
Authorized means authorized
The outcome also protects the other direction: information goes only to authorized staff and tools. Findings often contain usernames, hostnames, and sometimes snippets of data. Give access by role, review the list when people change jobs, and keep an audit trail of who opened sensitive findings.
Test the whole path
Every quarter, create a harmless test event and follow it from detection to a person acknowledging it and a ticket being worked. Note where it stalled. Repair the weak link and keep the test record as evidence.
Evidence to collect
- Alert routing configuration.
- Ticketing automation rules.
- Access lists for findings and security tools.
- Results of the quarterly alert path test.
Common gaps
Alerts sent to a shared inbox no one reads. Auto tickets assigned to a departed employee. Findings visible to everyone, or to only one person who is on holiday. No test of the path.
Quick check
Is an email to the whole team enough?
Usually not. Aim for a defined recipient, an acknowledgement, and a ticket that tracks the event to closure.
Sources
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 (NIST CSWP 29), DE.AE-06 and its implementation examples.
