- Use automatic updates with central health reporting; this requirement fails quietly on machines whose agent lost contact months ago.
- Include the update mechanism in monitoring: stale-signature alerts are cheap and catch the exact failure mode this requirement targets.
3.14.4OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWDERIVED REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.14.4 — Malicious code protection updates
3.14 System and Information Integrity · 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)
Update malicious code protection mechanisms when new releases are available.
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
Malware protection that stopped updating is a museum exhibit. Signatures, detection engines, and the platform itself update when new releases exist — automatically, with failures surfaced rather than silent.
Across revisions
Withdrawn as a standalone in Rev. 3 (03.14.04); keeping protection mechanisms current rides inside the consolidated Malicious Code Protection requirement, 03.14.02.
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
- Update configuration and signature-currency reports from the management console
- A stale-agent report showing machines out of contact were found and recovered
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 |